Chapter 4
Isla
The sirocco blew for four days, which was long even by Cala Sirena standards, and by the third day the whole town had settled into the particular rhythm the wind always demanded — shutters latched, voices lower, everyone moving through their errands like the air itself required a different kind of patience.
Roman came up to the villa every one of those four days.
I told myself it was practical. The wind had knocked a section of trellis loose in the lower vineyard, and he'd fixed it without being asked, methodically, the way he seemed to do everything, tools laid out in a line I refused to comment on even though I was absolutely thinking about the alphabetizing joke the entire time.
He'd checked the shutters on the east wall, the ones that always fought loose in a real blow.
He'd sat at the stone table going over wedding logistics with a level of organizational detail that would have made Signor Bracco weep with professional envy.
None of that required him to stay for dinner four nights running.
"You don't have to keep doing this," I said, on the fourth evening, watching him refill both our glasses without being asked, comfortable in my kitchen in a way that should have alarmed me more than it did. "The performance doesn't require witnesses when it's just us."
"I'm aware."
"So why are you here?"
He considered the question longer than the question probably warranted. "The trellis needed fixing."
"The trellis was fixed two days ago."
"The shutters, then."
"Also fixed. You checked them twice."
He didn't have an answer for that one, or if he did, he chose not to give it, and something about his silence told me more than an answer would have. I let it sit there between us, unresolved, because pushing on it felt like pushing on something neither of us was ready to look at directly.
We fell into something that wasn't quite routine yet but was heading there fast. He'd arrive in the late afternoon, and we'd work through some piece of the wedding logistics — guest lists, the venue, which of my grandmother's friends needed personal reassurance rather than a printed invitation — and somewhere in the middle of the practical conversation, it would just tip over into something else.
A story about his childhood on the docks.
A question about my grandmother's vineyard that had nothing to do with the will.
A joke, delivered so dry I almost missed it, that would catch me off guard and pull a laugh out of me before I'd decided whether laughing was safe.
"Tell me something true," I said, on the fourth night, when the wind had finally started to ease and the candle between us on the terrace table had stopped guttering sideways every few seconds. "Not for the performance. Not something Marta needs to hear. Something true."
He looked at me for a long moment, weighing it the way he weighed everything, and I watched him decide to actually answer instead of deflecting, which felt like a small victory even though I couldn't have said over what, exactly.
"I don't like being the one people depend on," he said. "Everyone in the club thinks I'm calm because I like the responsibility. I'm calm because someone has to be, and I learned a long time ago that if I let myself feel the weight of it, I'd never get anything done."
"That's not what I expected."
"You keep saying that to me."
"You keep surprising me." I turned my glass on the table, an old habit I'd apparently caught from watching him do it that first night at The Anchor. "Your turn to ask me something."
"Why haven't you dated anyone since the man who left you for your cousin's dermatologist?"
I laughed, sharp and surprised. "That's brutal."
"You offered."
"I did." I considered the honest answer, the one I hadn't said out loud to anyone, not even Renata.
"Because every man I've dated wanted the version of me that fit somewhere convenient in his life.
Paolo wanted a girlfriend who didn't mind being an afterthought.
The one before him wanted someone who'd move to Rome and stop talking about a vineyard he thought was a burden instead of a home.
Nobody ever wanted the actual, complicated, cliffside, stubborn version of me. It got easier to just — not."
"That's not what I expected either."
"Turnabout," I said, and he almost smiled, the real kind, the kind that still felt rare enough to notice every time it happened.
"One more," he said, before I could reach for my glass. "Since we're apparently doing this now."
"Greedy."
"I'm efficient. There's a difference." But there was warmth under the dryness, and I found I didn't actually want him to stop asking. "What did your grandmother think of the men you dated? The dermatologist's predecessor. The Rome one. Any of them."
I laughed, surprising myself with how easily it came.
"She hated Paolo on sight. Called him 'the human participation trophy' the first time he came to dinner, and he never quite recovered from it, honestly.
Kept trying to win her over with wine he thought was impressive and she thought was overpriced. "
"And the Rome one?"
"She never met him. That should probably have told me something."
"It should have."
"You're supposed to be comforting me, not agreeing with the evidence."
"I don't do comforting lies," he said. "Only comforting truths, when I've got one available."
"Do you have one available right now?"
He considered it, turning his glass the way he did when he was actually thinking instead of performing thought, which I'd learned to tell apart within the first week.
"Your grandmother sounds like she knew exactly what she was doing, leaving you this place with a condition attached instead of just handing it over clean. "
"Meaning?"
"Meaning she didn't just leave you a house.
She left you a reason to fight for something, on a deadline short enough that you couldn't talk yourself out of it the way you'd apparently talked yourself out of every man who wasn't worth keeping.
" He shrugged, like the observation cost him something to say out loud.
"That's either very cruel or very shrewd. Possibly both."
I sat with that longer than I expected to, the candle flickering low between us, the last of the wind sighing through the vines. "She was both those things constantly. It's probably her best and worst quality, depending on the week."
"Sounds like someone worth marrying a stranger to keep the memory of."
"That's the plan," I said, quieter than I meant to.
"That's the plan," he agreed, and for a moment neither of us said anything else, the silence comfortable in a way silences with near-strangers weren't supposed to be, and I found myself, not for the first time that week, forgetting entirely which parts of this were supposed to be performed.
On the fourth morning, before the wind had fully died, we drove into town together for the Saturday market, because Marta had made it very clear that the whole harbor expected a proper showing now that the engagement was official, and hiding up at the villa indefinitely would look, in her words, "suspicious in a way even I can't smooth over. "
The market was exactly the gauntlet I'd expected.
Every stall owner I'd known my whole life wanted a look at the fiancé, and Roman handled it with a patience that surprised me — letting old Signor Vitale interrogate him about his intentions toward "the Moretti girl" for a full ten minutes while pretending to compare olive oils, agreeing gravely that yes, he understood the responsibility, yes, he'd protect the vineyard with his life if it came to that, all delivered with a straight face that only cracked once, briefly, when Vitale asked if he knew how to prune a lemon tree and he admitted, with what I could tell was genuine embarrassment, that he did not.
"You're marrying into agriculture," Vitale told him solemnly, "and you don't know pruning. This is a problem."
"I'm told I'm a fast learner."
"Everyone says that. Nobody means it."
"I'll prove it," Roman said, and Vitale laughed so hard he had to sit down on his own crate of lemons, and I stood there watching a biker who alphabetized his tools charm an eighty-year-old farmer into hysterics over citrus maintenance, and something in my chest did a complicated thing I didn't have a tidy name for yet.
"He's better than the last one," Vitale told me afterward, when Roman had wandered a few stalls down to inspect something with Renata, who'd ambushed us the second she spotted us and had been evaluating him with open, unashamed scrutiny ever since.
"The dermatologist's boyfriend. Terrible man. Didn't know a lemon from a lime."
"He wasn't my boyfriend, he was my ex's new boyfriend."
"Whatever he was, this one's better." Vitale nodded toward Roman with the air of a man delivering a verified fact. "He looks at you like you're the only stall in the market."
I didn't have a response for that, which Vitale seemed to find extremely satisfying, judging by the smug little smile he gave me before turning back to his lemons.
Renata cornered me by the cheese stall a few minutes later, Roman still out of earshot, examining a display of dried herbs with an expression of polite bafflement.
"Okay," she said. "I take back everything I said on the phone. He's charming Vitale. Nobody charms Vitale. I've watched that man reduce grown fishermen to tears over improperly ripened tomatoes."
"He's good at reading people."
"He's good at reading you, specifically, is what I'm seeing. Do you know you've been standing closer to him all morning without noticing you're doing it?"
"That's for the performance."
"Isla, there is no performance currently happening. Vitale's gone back to his lemons. Nobody's watching you right now except me, and you're still doing it."