CHAPTER 3
LUCIA
Valentina Russo arrives at my house on a Thursday, unannounced, four days before the engagement is made public, carrying nothing but a garment bag and the serene confidence of a woman who has never been told a door was locked.
Rosa lets her in because Rosa has instructions from Matteo, and I find them both in the front hall, Rosa wearing the face she saves for burst pipes.
“Mrs. Bellini,” Valentina says, handing Rosa the garment bag without looking at her.
“Be careful with this, it’s couture. And it’s Ms. Russo for now, but I’ll make it easy for everyone soon.
” She turns and finds me on the upstairs landing, and her face arranges itself into delight.
“Lucia. There you are. I was hoping we’d get time together, just us girls. ”
Just us girls. I come down the stairs and I am aware, with detached professional interest, that I have hosted senators with less nerve than this woman.
“Valentina. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Matteo said I should start getting familiar with the house.” She says his name with a little extra gloss on it, a coat of ownership. “I hope you don’t mind. I gave the driver the afternoon off and told myself to wander.”
“I mind about as much as the furniture minds,” I say. “Rosa, coffee in the morning room, please.”
I play hostess because hostess is the armor that fits me best, and for the next hour Valentina Russo tours my home and appraises it in real time.
The morning room gets “quaint.” The main staircase gets “we could open this whole wall up, couldn’t we?
Matteo loves light.” She stands in the doorway of my private sitting room, the small one off the second-floor landing, the one room in this mansion that is mine in every sense the law doesn’t require — my books, my mother’s mirror, the chair where I nursed Nico through his whole colicky first year — and she tilts her head.
“This is sweet,” she says. “So cozy. You know, it would make a wonderful dressing room. The light in here is perfect for fittings.”
“It’s a sitting room.”
“Mm.” She smiles at me, warm as a debt collector. “For now.”
She moves on before I can answer, which I understand is also a technique. Down the hall she pauses at Nico’s playroom, at the Lego marina spread across the rug and the dinosaur posters Matteo calls an eyesore and I call a childhood.
“He’s seven, isn’t he?” she says. “Boys that age need structure. My sister’s boys were feral until she got them into the academy in Greenwich. Full board. They came back civilized.”
“Nico goes to school ten minutes from here,” I say. “He comes home every day. That’s the structure.”
“Mm,” she says again, and wanders on, and I file it away, first entry in a ledger I didn’t know I was keeping. She has opinions about my son. She’s rehearsing them.
In the kitchen she runs a finger along the marble and asks Rosa — asks Rosa, in Rosa’s own kitchen — whether the ovens are “actually any good,” and Rosa says they bake bread every morning, and Valentina says, “Well, we’ll be bringing in a proper chef, of course, so it hardly matters.
” Rosa’s eyes find mine over Valentina’s shoulder, and in them is a question I can’t answer yet: who do I take orders from now?
Hold the line, I think at her. Hold the line until I know where the line is.
And then she lifts her hand to push her hair back, and I see the bracelet.
Gold, heavy, old, the Colt crest worked into the clasp.
I know that bracelet like my own wedding ring, because I was shown it once, years ago, by Matteo’s aunt, who told me the family gave it to the women who married in.
She said one day it would be mine, when Matteo chose the moment.
Matteo never chose the moment. For nine years it sat in a family vault, waiting for an occasion that never came.
The occasion, apparently, is Thursday.
“That’s a beautiful bracelet,” I say, and my voice is so level I could balance a glass on it.
“Isn’t it?” She turns her wrist, letting it catch the light, making sure I see every link.
“A family piece. Matteo had it brought out of the vault for me. He said it should be worn by the woman who’ll carry the name.
Such a romantic, your—” She catches herself, delicately, a ballerina of cruelty. “Well. You know.”
My husband. She was going to say your husband, and she stopped, and the stop was the point.
Lunch is worse, because Matteo joins us, and Matteo performs a version of the future he thinks he’s building: three people at one table, civilized, modern, everybody reasonable.
He talks about the port contracts. He talks about Nico’s school play.
He is, I realize, genuinely trying, which makes it so much worse, because he thinks this can work, he thinks goodwill is a resource he can spend like money.
Valentina touches him eleven times. I count. His forearm when she laughs. His shoulder when she leans to reach the salt she doesn’t need. His thigh, under the table, once, her hand resting there while she tells me, in exquisite detail, about the florist she’s considering for the engagement ball.
Matteo moves her hand off his thigh. Once.
Slowly, gently, and without a single word of correction, his eyes on his plate, his jaw tight.
A private refusal in a public room. He won’t embarrass her in front of me, and I understand with perfect clarity that he will also never defend me in front of her.
He’s going to spend the rest of his life in the exact center of that table, keeping both women, correcting no one.
“So, the guest list,” Valentina says, producing a slim folder from beside her chair, and suddenly we’re in a meeting I never agreed to attend.
“Marco’s people, obviously. The Carusos, though God knows they’ll drink the bar dry.
The judge and his wife. And I thought — tell me if this is too bold — the long table for family, and you and I could sit on either side of Matteo. Symbolic. Both families, one future.”
“Symbolic,” I say.
“People read tables, Lucia. You of all people know that.”
I do know that. I have spent nine years reading tables for this family, and she has just casually drafted me into seating my own demotion.
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” I say.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think.” She smiles, and there’s a pause in it, a half-beat that says weeks, months, longer than you know. “Matteo keeps me very well informed.”
“Which brings me to the fun part,” Valentina says, spearing a cherry tomato. “The ball. Marco wants it to be the event of the season, and everyone knows you’re the best party-thrower in this city. The Colt Christmas thing? Legendary. I’d be lost without you.”
I put down my fork.
“You want me to organize your engagement ball?”
“I want you to be part of it. Isn’t that right, Matteo?” She turns to him, glowing. “We talked about this. It would mean so much, having Lucia involved. It would show everyone the family is united. No awkwardness, no gossip. Just one big happy—”
“Lucia.” Matteo’s voice is careful. “It would help. People talk, you know how they talk, and if you’re seen to be supporting the announcement, the transition goes smoothly. For everyone. For Nico.”
For Nico. He says our son’s name into the conversation like a man laying a gun on the table, casually, just so everyone knows it’s there.
“No,” I say.
The room goes very quiet. Valentina’s smile doesn’t move, but her eyes do, flicking to Matteo, interested, a spectator now.
“I’m sorry?” he says.
“No. I won’t organize the ball, I won’t attend the ball, and I won’t stand in my own home smiling at guests while you introduce the woman you’re replacing me with.” My voice stays even. Some distant part of me is proud. The rest of me is screaming. “You’ll have to unite the family without me.”
“Lucia.” The patience is thinning now, the captain’s son surfacing.
“Think about what you’re doing. You’re letting jealousy make decisions for you, and jealousy is a luxury.
This alliance protects Nico’s inheritance.
Everything I build, I build for him, and when you undermine it, you’re undermining your own son’s future. ”
There it is. Nine years, and I never saw it this clearly: my love for Nico isn’t a fact of our family to Matteo. It’s a lever, conveniently shaped, always within reach.
“My son’s future,” I say, “was doing fine when his parents were married. Which, as we recently established, they never were.”
I stand. Valentina watches me with something close to admiration, and I hate her for it, and I hate that I understand her, because she’s not stupid, she’s testing how far the floor goes before it stops being floor.
“Enjoy the lunch,” I say. “Rosa made the tart. It’s my recipe.”
I leave before either of them can answer, which is a small, cowardly victory, and I take it.
Nico finds me in my sitting room that evening, the room that’s earmarked for fittings, and crawls into my lap even though he’s getting too big for laps and we’ve both started pretending he isn’t.
“Mom,” he says into my shoulder. “Who’s Valentina?”
My whole body goes still. “Where did you hear that name?”
“She was here. I saw the car. And Sal’s driver said—” He stops, because even at seven he’s learned not to say what drivers say. “Will she be my new mother?”
“Hey. Look at me.” I take his face in my hands, this face I know better than my own, Matteo’s dark eyes and my stubborn chin, the treaty of our two families written in one small person.
“Nobody is your mom but me. That doesn’t change.
Not ever, not for anyone, no matter what any adult in this house says. Do you hear me?”
He nods. His lip is doing the thing it does when he’s being brave, and I pull him in and hold him while he doesn’t cry, both of us working hard at it.
Rosa brings me tea I didn’t ask for and stands in the doorway drying her hands on a towel that doesn’t need drying.
“She asked me today whether I stay on after,” Rosa says. “After. Like that.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her I serve at the pleasure of the lady of the house.” She says it flat, and then she looks at me, and I see what it costs her, because Rosa has a mortgage and a niece in nursing school and no illusions about which of us signs her paycheck.
“I’ll hold as long as you do, Lucia. But you should know — the staff are talking.
Some of them are already deciding it’s safer to take her orders.
Not because they love her. Because they’re afraid of being last in line when the music stops. ”
“I know.”
“Do something soon,” she says quietly, and goes, and it’s not disloyalty, it’s love wearing its practical coat.
After Nico is asleep I sit in the blue room and do arithmetic of a different kind.
No legal marriage. No legal protections.
A father who says Nico’s name like a lever and a new woman who wants my sitting room and my bracelet and, it turns out, my son’s definition of mother.
Matteo has promised me a place in this house, and his promises, I have recently learned, are filed in the same courthouse as our marriage.
Nowhere.
I think about my father, who hasn’t called in three weeks, which for Enzo Moretti is a silence with a shape to it. He knows. Of course he knows. Men of my father’s kind always know before the women do; that’s the whole system.
Tomorrow I’ll go see him. Tomorrow I’ll ask him to stand up for his daughter, and some hopeful, exhausted part of me still believes he will.
I fall asleep planning what I’ll say to him.
I should have spent the time planning what I’d do when he said no.