Chapter 2
Isla
I made a list.
It's what I do when a decision is too big to hold in my head all at once — I break it into columns, pros on one side, cons on the other, and I let the paper do the arguing so I don't have to do it at two in the morning, staring at my grandmother's ceiling beams, which is where I usually end up doing it anyway.
Pros of marrying a stranger named Crow: Keep the villa. Keep the vineyard. Keep the only home I have that isn't attached to somebody else's idea of what I should do with my life. Stop the little white flags from multiplying along the cliff path like some kind of invasive species.
Cons of marrying a stranger named Crow: Everything else.
I called my best friend Renata instead of finishing the list, because some decisions require a second, louder, more opinionated brain.
"Say that again," she said, "slower, because I don't think I heard you correctly the first four times."
"A marriage of convenience. With a biker. Named Crow."
"Isla."
"I know."
"You are aware that this is the plot of at least eleven movies I have personally watched with you."
"I am aware."
"And in every single one of those movies, it goes badly before it goes well, and there's always a scene where somebody cries in the rain."
"It doesn't rain here in July, Ren. We'd have to fake that too."
She was quiet for a second, which for Renata was basically a full minute of anyone else's silence. "Is he hot?"
"That is not the relevant question."
"It is extremely the relevant question if you're about to marry the man."
I thought about him sitting across from me at The Anchor, elbows on the table, laying out his terms like he was presenting a business case to a board — which, I supposed, he was, in a way, and I was the board, deciding whether to approve the merger.
Dark hair, a little too long to be tidy and a little too tidy to be careless.
A jaw that did most of its talking before his mouth ever got involved.
Eyes that watched you like he was already three moves ahead in a game you didn't know you were playing.
"He's fine," I said, which was a lie, and Renata knew it was a lie, and neither of us acknowledged it out loud.
"Okay. Setting aside his objectively fine face. Is the deal actually good? Or does it just sound good because you're desperate and he showed up with a plan and a motorcycle?"
That was, infuriatingly, the better question.
I looked back down at my list. Ninety days.
A trust that wanted to liquidate. A developer with a folder full of the word "unlock.
" A grandmother who'd built a life on that cliff stone by stone and left it to me with one condition attached, like she'd known — somehow, impossibly, from wherever she was now — that I'd need a push to actually fight for it instead of just missing her quietly forever.
"The deal is good," I said slowly, working it out as I spoke.
"He's not asking for anything I don't already control.
No money. No claim on the property — I already told the lawyer I want that in writing, ironclad, before I sign anything.
Just a performance. A public engagement, a wedding date, an exit clause once the will's condition is satisfied and the land's legally secured. "
"And you trust him?"
"I don't know him well enough to trust him," I said. "But I trust the math. He needs this to work as badly as I do. That's not romance, but it's leverage, and leverage I understand."
"God, you sound like a hostage negotiator."
"I feel like a hostage negotiator."
I called him three days later, against my own advice to myself, because a week felt like too long to sit with a decision this large, and because every morning I woke up to another white flag staked somewhere new along the path, closer to the villa each time, like Ardente's surveyors were counting down with me.
"Roman," I said, when he picked up.
"Most people call me Crow."
"I'm not most people."
"No," he said, and there was something in his voice that might have been amusement, might have been approval, might have just been the particular flatness of a man who didn't waste inflection on things that didn't require it. "You've decided."
"I have conditions."
"I'd be worried if you didn't."
We met at the villa this time, not The Anchor, because I wanted him to see it — actually see it, the terraces and the stone walls and the lemon trees my grandmother had planted the year I was born, so that if he was going to stand in front of a priest and lie about loving me, he'd at least understand what he was lying to protect.
He arrived on the motorcycle, which I hadn't expected somehow, even though it should have been obvious — the club, the leather jacket, the whole aesthetic Renata had already started making fun of before she'd even met him.
He killed the engine at the top of the drive and sat there a second, looking at the villa the way you look at something you're recalculating your opinion of.
"It's bigger than the file made it sound," he said, by way of greeting.
"The file didn't mention the roof needs replacing, either, I bet."
"It did not."
"Well. Welcome to the full disclosure portion of the negotiation."
We sat at the stone table under the pergola, where my grandmother used to shell beans in the evenings with the radio playing something scratchy and Italian, and I laid out my terms the way he'd laid out his — clean, numbered, no room for interpretation.
"One. No financial claim on the property, before, during, or after, regardless of how this ends. My lawyer draws up a prenuptial agreement, ironclad, and you sign it before we so much as tell a single person we're engaged."
"Agreed."
"Two. Separate lives outside of what's required for the performance. I'm not doing a real marriage. I'm doing a contract with a ring attached."
"Agreed."
"Three. An exit date, built in from the start. The day the will's condition is legally satisfied and Ardente's out of the picture for good, we file for divorce, or annulment, or whatever's cleanest, and we go back to being strangers who nod at each other in town."
He was quiet a second. "Agreed. Though I'd add a clause of my own, if you're amenable."
"Go on."
"Discretion. Whatever happens during the performance — arguments, awkwardness, the inevitable moment one of us says something stupid at a dinner party — stays between us. My club can't afford this looking like anything less than solid, and I imagine your reputation in town matters just as much."
I thought about it, about the version of this where the whole town watched us, judged us, decided what our fake marriage said about both of us. "Agreed."
"Then we have a deal." He held out his hand, formal, like we were closing on real estate instead of committing to lie to an entire town for ninety-plus days.
I shook it. His hand was warm and dry and steadier than mine, and I hated, a little, how solid it felt.
"There's one more thing," I said, not letting go of the handshake quite as fast as I should have.
"What's that?"
"If we're doing this, we do it convincingly.
My grandmother's oldest friends will be at that wedding.
Marta at The Anchor has known me since I was six and can smell a lie from across the harbor.
If this looks fake for even a second, it doesn't just embarrass us — it undermines the whole point.
The will requires a legitimate marriage, and legitimate means believable. "
"I'm aware."
"Are you? Because you propose like you're closing a merger, and I need you to be able to hold my hand at a dinner table without looking like you're calculating my net worth."
Something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, but the architecture of one, there and gone. "I can be convincing when convincing is the assignment."
"We'll see."
"We will," he agreed, and there was a challenge in it now, small and dry, the first genuine spark of personality I'd seen crack through the spreadsheet exterior.
"For what it's worth, Isla — that's your name, isn't it, I should probably know that before I marry you — I don't do anything halfway.
If I say I'll be convincing, I'll be convincing. "
"That's not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be comforting. It was meant to be accurate."
We spent the next hour drafting the actual terms into something resembling a real document, sitting at that stone table while the light went gold and then pink over the water, and it should have felt clinical — it was clinical, technically, two people negotiating the exact architecture of a lie — but there was something almost companionable about it too.
The way he asked good questions. The way he didn't flinch when I got sharp about my grandmother's memory, didn't try to smooth it over with something hollow, just let it sit there and be true.
"How do we explain how we met?" I asked, halfway through, pen hovering over the pad. "The whole town knows I haven't so much as looked at a man since Paolo, and everyone also knows you ride a motorcycle for a living and I have never once set foot in your clubhouse."
"We say we met at The Anchor."
"That's not a story, that's a location."
"Fine. We met at The Anchor, and I annoyed you into liking me."
"That part's not far off," I admitted, and he had the audacity to look pleased about it.
"But we need details. Marta's going to ask when, exactly, and if our timelines don't line up she'll know inside of thirty seconds.
She once caught my cousin cheating on a fish story purely by cross-referencing tide charts. "
"Terrifying woman."
"You have no idea."