Chapter Sixty-One Nursery Nights
They chose the room together — a bright, south-facing space down the hall from their own, flooded with afternoon sun, the kind of room that had probably never once been used for anything joyful in the whole cold history of the Moretti estate.
"We could paint it anything," Elena said, standing in the empty room with paint swatches fanned across her palm. "We don't have to keep to tradition. Blue for a boy, pink for a girl — I don't even want to know before the birth, if you don't."
"I don't need to know either." Dante stood behind her, chin resting on her shoulder, both of them looking at the bare walls with the particular wonder of people imagining a future neither had let themselves picture clearly before.
"I only know I want it to feel nothing like the nursery I grew up in.
Cold, formal, decorated to impress guests rather than comfort a child.
" His arms tightened around her. "I want this room to feel like your sitting room did, the first week you moved in — soft, and warm, and entirely built around making someone feel safe. "
They painted it themselves, over several ridiculous, paint-splattered evenings, refusing outright Sofia's offer to hire a professional.
Dante turned out to be considerably better with a paintbrush than a stovetop, though Elena still teased him mercilessly about the streak of pale yellow he somehow got in his hair and failed to notice for an entire afternoon.
"Your mother would have loved this," Elena said quietly, one evening, watching him carefully assemble a crib with an instruction manual he refused, on principle, to properly read. "I wish she could see it. See you like this."
Dante's hands stilled on the half-built crib.
"I think about that more than I let on," he admitted.
"I think she'd have spoiled this child rotten, the way she spoiled me before everything changed.
I think she'd have loved watching me become the kind of father my own father never bothered trying to be.
" He looked up, something raw in his expression.
"I had her piano moved in here, actually.
I didn't tell you. It's arriving Thursday.
I want our child to grow up around the sound of it, the way I did, before everything went quiet. "
Elena crossed the room and knelt beside him amid the scattered crib pieces, kissing him slow and grateful. "That's the most beautiful thing you've ever told me," she whispered. "Truly."
They finished the nursery two weeks later — soft yellow walls, the reclaimed piano tucked into the corner by the window, a rocking chair Elena had found at a small antique shop with her reconnected friends, insisting on choosing it herself rather than letting Dante simply buy the most expensive option available.
It was, by any measure, an unremarkable room.
It was, to both of them, the truest evidence yet of everything their marriage had become — chosen, deliberate, built with their own clumsy, paint-streaked hands instead of handed down cold and formal from a history neither of them wanted to repeat.
"What should we name her?" Elena asked one night, both of them sprawled on the nursery floor amid half-finished shelving, her hand resting on the now-unmistakable curve of her stomach. "Or him. Whichever we end up with."
"Renata, if it's a girl," Dante said quietly, without hesitation, as though he'd been holding the thought for weeks. "After my mother. If you'll allow it."
"I'd love that." Elena's eyes had gone bright. "And if it's a boy?"
"I hadn't thought that far. I was too afraid to hope for either, until recently.
" He laced his fingers through hers, resting their joined hands over their unborn child.
"Perhaps Antonio, actually. After your father.
Not the man he was when this all began — the man he's become since. Trying, imperfectly, to be better."
Elena's throat tightened with unexpected emotion. "You'd give our son my father's name?"
"I'd give our child every good thing either of our families ever managed to produce," Dante said simply, "and leave the rest of it behind, exactly where it belongs."