CHAPTER 5
LUCIA
Permission, once granted, has a way of becoming ownership. Alessandra Rinaldi understands this better than anyone I’ve ever met, and I say that as a woman who married into a family that owns a coastline.
It starts with my sitting room.
I have a small private sitting room off the family wing, the one room in the palace that is entirely mine.
No portrait hangs in it that I didn’t choose.
The books are mine. The desk is the one I carried from my old apartment the week before the wedding, over the protests of three decorators and one mother-in-law.
It is where I built the foundation, one grant application at a time.
On Monday I find Alessandra in it, hosting a meeting.
She’s at my desk. There’s tea service laid out that Beatriz apparently delivered, because Beatriz has orders from people above me now, a fact I’ll be addressing.
Three women from the hospital auxiliary sit on my sofa, and Alessandra is taking notes with my pen, in my chair, under my window, and when I appear in the doorway she doesn’t startle. Startling is for guests.
“Lucia.” She smiles, warm and seamless. “We didn’t want to disturb you. The blue salon is being redecorated, and the count suggested this room. I hope you don’t mind. It’s nearly done.”
It’s nearly done. The meeting or the takeover, she doesn’t specify.
“Carry on,” I say, and I leave, because the alternative is making a scene in front of the hospital auxiliary, and scenes are what fragile princesses make, and I refuse to hand her the evidence.
By Thursday there are more rooms. Luca’s things migrate out of the guest wing in ones and twos, a model ship here, a schoolbook there, until one evening I find a pair of small shoes outside a door in the family wing, three doors down from the yellow one.
Little shoes, neatly placed. Nobody moves into a corridor by accident.
Shoes are how you test whether anyone objects.
And then, at Friday’s reception for the maritime league, she wears the brooch.
I see it from the top of the stairs before I see anything else. You would too, if you knew it. The Bellacosta Sapphire, the size of a quail egg, two hundred years in the Villari vault, worn by the wife of the prince at state occasions.
I have worn it myself countless times. It is not jewelry. It is a sentence. And it is pinned to Alessandra Rinaldi’s dress while she stands beside my husband accepting the maritime league’s congratulations. She has positioned it exactly high enough that every photograph tonight will be about it.
I make it down the stairs without incident. I make it through the reception. I shake hands with an admiral and compliment his wife’s hat and I am, by all available evidence, fine.
Inside, I am counting. That’s the thing about humiliation at this altitude: it’s all arithmetic. Eleven times I wore it. Two hundred years of wives. One duchess, temporarily presented, wearing the sentence that used to be mine.
I wait until midnight, until the last admiral is poured into the last car, and then I find Antonio in his study, still in his tie. I don’t sit down.
“The brooch.”
He goes still. He’s seen it, then. All evening, inches away, and he let it happen, and the stillness is him deciding which version of the truth to lead with.
“The vault released it for the reception,” he says. “There’s a list of approved pieces for official events. Someone put it on the list.”
“Someone.” I nod. “The vault released the sapphire, the palace’s single most recognizable symbol of the prince’s wife, to another woman, and the mechanism was a list. Are you hearing yourself?”
“I saw it at the reception. I couldn’t remove it in front of all those people without creating the story you accuse me of enabling.” He loosens his tie, a man undressing a bad day. “It will be returned tonight. I’ll have the list reviewed. She won’t wear it again.”
“Returned tonight.” I laugh, a single, short note with nothing in it.
“Antonio, the photographs are already taken. Tonight, every paper in the principality is printing a picture of Alessandra Rinaldi wearing my brooch beside my husband. The return of the physical object is not the fix you think it is. You can’t un-pin it from the country’s imagination. ”
“What do you want me to do? Issue a statement about jewelry?”
“I want you to say the word you keep not saying.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “The arrangement is temporary, Lucia. The brooch is a mistake, and mistakes inside a temporary arrangement don’t matter. They expire.”
There it is again. Temporary. The word has become his religion.
Alessandra finds me on Sunday, which tells me she wanted an audience of one.
I’m in the rose garden, dead-heading, because it’s the sole task in this palace nobody has thought to reassign. She comes along the path in her perfect weekend simplicity and sits down uninvited on the bench opposite.
“You should know I argued against the brooch,” she says. “The vault insisted. I want you to know it wasn’t my idea.”
“You’re so thoughtful.”
“I’m practical.” She examines a rose without touching it.
“Lucia, I’ll be direct, because I respect you too much to manage you.
The country cannot mourn a child forever.
Neither can a family. Neither can a man.
” She says it gently, gently, the knife wrapped in all that silk.
“What happened to you is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. I mean that. But Bellacosta is not a woman. It doesn’t get to stop.
Someone has to keep walking, and it can be you, walking again, at your own pace.
I would like that. Or it can be someone else, walking now. ”
“And you’re the someone else?”
“I’m the practical option while you grieve.” She stands, and she looks down at me with what I can only call sincere ambition. “Think about your own pace, Lucia. That’s all. Others are.”
She leaves me with the roses, and I sit there in the autumn sun, and I take her advice.
I think about my own pace. And I decide that today, two months and nine days after the worst day of my life, is the day I stop being afraid of a yellow door.
The key is where it always was. Third drawer of my desk, my desk, in my sitting room, where a duchess now takes meetings.
The corridor is empty. The whole wing is empty; it’s the staff’s rest hour, and the family is at some lunch I declined.
My hand doesn’t shake as I turn the key. Two months of shaking hands at this door, and today, nothing. Steady. That’s mine to keep, whatever else gets taken.
The curtains are half open, the way they were. The crib is assembled. Antonio did that himself, in the spring, with the instructions in four languages and a confidence inversely proportional to his skill, and it took him five hours, and it’s perfect.
There’s a yellow blanket over the rail, soft as anything I’ve ever touched.
There are tiny clothes in the dresser, folded by me, refolded by me, folded a third time for no reason but love.
There’s a mobile of little felt stars we bought in a mountain market, in a village whose name we never learned, because we were too busy being happy to take notes.
I sit down on the floor, in the middle of all of it, and I say her name, and I tell her about her room.
I tell her the stars turned out to need batteries and we never bought them.
I tell her the blanket was my choice and the paint was her father’s and the crib was a joint disaster.
I tell her the house has been unkind since she left.
The dust gets in my throat, the lavender gets in my chest, and I hold on fine, right up until I find the box.
It’s under the crib, a shoebox, and in it are the things that weren’t decorations: the ultrasound picture, the knitted hat from the northern cooperative that I set aside months before the others, and a card in Antonio’s handwriting, written the night we knew, that says only: Sofia.
We already love you. Come when you’re ready.
That’s where Antonio finds me. On the floor, in the dust, holding his handwriting.
He doesn’t speak. He comes and sits down on the floor beside me, back against the dresser, shoulder against mine, and we sit in our daughter’s room for the first time since she died, and for a while it is the only honest room in the palace.
“We should have come together,” he says finally. “I’ve stood outside that door too. Every day. I never told you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I couldn’t fix it.” His voice is rough. “There’s nothing in there I can fix, so I stood in the corridor and did nothing, and I told myself working was the same as grieving.” He turns the card over in his fingers, reads his own words once, and has to stop for a while. “I meant every word.”
“I know.”
“I still mean them.”
“I know.”
And there, on that floor, for an hour, we are Sofia’s parents and nothing else, and I think maybe. Maybe we survive this. Maybe the door was the hard part.
Then his phone rings.
He ignores it. It rings again, and it’s the ringtone, the one only three people have, and on the third ring he looks at the screen and I watch him become someone else. The prince arrives in his face, fast, from somewhere far away, and the father goes somewhere I can’t follow.
“Emeric,” he says. “Emergency session. The coastal banks moved up the renewal talks, and the family needs an answer tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“They’ve called a full council.”
He gets to his feet. He doesn’t say he has to go. He just starts doing the going, straightening his cuffs, and something in me stands up too, and I hear myself say it, plainly, once.
“Don’t go.”
He stops.
“Antonio. We are sitting in our daughter’s room for the first time since we lost her. Whatever is in that meeting, it has waited two months. It can wait one night. Stay with me. Choose this room, just once, over that one.”
For a moment I truly believe he will. It’s in his face, all of it, the war I know too well, and I can see the side of him that sleeps on floors and builds cribs for five hours and writes come when you’re ready.
Then his thumb moves over the screen, silencing it, and he says, “One hour. I’ll give them their answer and I’ll come straight back, and we’ll finish this evening together. I promise you.”
“You just found her room,” I say. “And now you’re leaving it.”
“I’m coming back to it.”
But he’s already moving, already at the door, and he pauses there with his hand on the frame, on the frame of our daughter’s door, and he says, “This isn’t me choosing them. This is me ending it faster.”
Then he’s gone. His footsteps fade down the corridor, quick, purposeful, a man off to save something.
I stay on the floor. The stars hang motionless over the crib. And I sit in the honest room for a long time after the honest hour ends, holding a shoebox, doing the math of a marriage, and getting the same answer every time.
One hour, he said.
He doesn’t come back that night.