Chapter 2 #2
We worked it out between us — a version of events close enough to the truth to survive scrutiny, vague enough to leave room for error.
A chance meeting at the bar three weeks ago, before the will's deadline had even become public knowledge, because apparently he'd been meaning to talk to me about a supply route through my land for entirely separate reasons and one thing, allegedly, had led to another.
It was a good lie, as lies went. Practical.
Built with the same care he seemed to build everything.
"You're very good at this," I said.
"At lying?"
"At planning. It's unsettling how quickly you assembled a fake courtship."
"I told you. I don't do anything halfway." He set his pen down and looked at me, and for the first time since he'd arrived, the calculation in his expression eased into something closer to curiosity. "Can I ask you something? Off the record, since apparently we're doing that now."
"You can ask."
"Why didn't you just leave? Sell the villa, take the money, start over somewhere the coast isn't trying to eat itself for profit. You clearly could have. It would have been easier."
I looked out at the vineyard, at the rows going dark blue in the last of the light, at the little stone hut where my grandmother used to store the pruning shears like they were heirlooms instead of tools.
"Because leaving is easy exactly once," I said.
"After that it's just a habit. My mother left when I was nine.
Went to Milan for 'a season' and came back four years later like the intervening time hadn't happened.
My grandmother never left this cliff for anything, not once, not even when my grandfather died and everyone told her the memories would be easier to carry somewhere new.
" I shrugged, though it didn't feel like a shrugging kind of sentence.
"I decided a long time ago I wasn't going to be the leaving kind.
Turns out that's a harder promise to keep than it sounds, when the whole legal system is conspiring against you. "
He didn't say anything comforting, which I appreciated more than I expected to. He just nodded, like he was filing the information away somewhere it would actually be used for something, and said, "Then we make sure you don't have to."
It wasn't romantic. It was, if anything, the most businesslike sentence a person could construct out of those particular words.
But something about the way he said it — flat, certain, like a fact rather than a promise — settled something in my chest that had been unsettled since the lawyer's office.
"Last thing," I said, as the light started to fade and the cicadas ramped up into their evening argument. "What do I call you? In front of people. 'Crow' feels like something you'd shout across a garage, not something I'd say across a dinner table."
"Roman," he said. "Only my club calls me Crow."
"Roman," I repeated, testing it. It suited him better than I expected — steadier, less performative than the nickname, like the version of him underneath the leather and the strategy.
"And I'll call you Isla," he said. "Since apparently that's the deal now."
"That's the deal."
We shook on it again, more casually this time, and when he swung back onto the motorcycle and pulled away down the drive, I stood on the terrace a long time watching the dust settle, thinking that I had just agreed to marry a man whose last name I still didn't know, for reasons that were entirely practical and had absolutely nothing to do with the way my stomach had done something unfamiliar every time he'd looked at me like he was actually listening.
It was a business arrangement.
I told myself that twice more before I went inside, which should probably have told me something.
Renata called back within the hour, because of course she did, because Renata had radar for exactly this kind of development and no capacity whatsoever to wait politely for updates.
"Well?"
"We shook on it. Twice."
"Twice? What happened during the first handshake that required a second one?"
"Nothing happened. It was a normal handshake."
"You don't call a friend to report on a normal handshake, Isla. I have known you since primary school. Talk."
I sat down on the terrace steps, phone against my ear, looking out at the dark shape of the vineyard settling into night. "He's — organized. Methodical. He had actual terms. Written down. He agreed to a prenuptial agreement before I even finished the sentence."
"That's either the most romantic thing I've ever heard or the least romantic thing I've ever heard, and I genuinely cannot decide which."
"It's neither. It's practical."
"Uh-huh. And is 'practical' why you're currently sitting on your own porch in the dark instead of inside eating dinner like a person who just closed a very sensible business deal?"
I didn't have a good answer for that, so I changed the subject, the way I always did when Renata got too close to a nerve I hadn't finished mapping myself.
"He rides a motorcycle to a business meeting, Ren. Wears a leather jacket in July. Somehow makes 'I'll be convincing when convincing is the assignment' sound like a threat and a promise at the same time."
"Oh, you're doomed."
"I am not doomed. I am engaged. For business reasons. There's a difference."
"There is absolutely a difference, and I fully expect you to remember that difference right up until the wedding, at which point I predict, with great confidence, that it will evaporate entirely."
"You're supposed to be supportive."
"I am being extremely supportive. I'm supporting the version of you that's about to fake-marry a man with a nickname like a Bond villain and pretend it's just paperwork. Somebody's got to keep score."
I laughed despite myself, the first real laugh I'd had since the lawyer's office, and it felt good the way it always did with Renata — like a pressure valve releasing, like the world was still a place you could laugh in, even with survey flags marching down your cliff path and a stranger's handshake still warm on your palm.
"Ninety days," I said, mostly to myself. "How complicated can it get in ninety days?"
Renata, wisely, did not answer that question out loud. I could hear her deciding not to, which was somehow worse.
"One more thing," she said instead, carefully casual in a way that meant it wasn't casual at all. "What does he look like when he's not calculating something? You said he softened, at the end. Talking about your grandmother. What did that look like?"
I thought about it — actually thought about it, replaying the moment on the terrace when the spreadsheet had briefly gone quiet behind his eyes.
"Like someone was translating a language he didn't usually let himself speak," I said.
"And it wasn't clumsy. That was the strange part.
It was like he'd just been choosing not to, this whole time. "
"Isla."
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said my name in that tone. That's a whole sentence on its own."
"I'm just saying, for a business arrangement, you clocked that pretty fast."
"I notice things," I said. "It's a survival skill. Comes from growing up watching lawyers try to smile at me while stealing my house."
"Sure," Renata said, entirely unconvinced, and I let her have the last word because arguing further would only prove her point, and some battles weren't worth the paperwork.
I hung up not long after, and sat a while longer on the steps in the dark, listening to the cicadas and the far-off hush of the sea against the rocks below, and told myself, one final time, that whatever I'd noticed on that terrace was simply good observation and nothing more.
The villa creaked around me in the warm night air, settling the way old houses do, and I could have sworn, just for a second, that it sounded almost like agreement.