7. Rosa
SEVEN
Rosa
"Did you hear about Isabella?" Giulia's words hit the counter like a thrown stone.
She didn't wait for me to answer. She shoved a folded scrap of newsprint into my hand, eyes bright with gossip and something else—pity or warning; I couldn't tell which.
The headline was blunt: a witness placing Paolo near Porto Vecchio the night something bad happened, with a subhead that suggested Moretti involvement.
My pulse thudded. I smoothed the paper until the creases burned my fingers.
"Who wrote this?" I asked.
"Someone from Matteo's circle," Giulia said. "Lucia said she saw the same post. It's everywhere."
Everywhere. The word crawled under my skin. I thought of the flashes Paolo had told me about—Isabella, the chapel, soil staining a pair of hands. I thought of nights when he woke with the taste of metal in his mouth and the way he'd clench his jaw until his knuckles paled.
"Don't drag this into the shop," I said. "You know how this looks."
Giulia's face softened. "I'm sorry. I just—Rosa, you should know."
I pressed the paper between my palms until it fluttered.
My throat tightened with something I hadn't expected: a hot, helpless fury that knew how to quiet itself into careful questions.
If Paolo had been there, what had he done?
If he had a hand in what destroyed my past, could the man I was learning to trust also be the one who broke me?
"I'll handle it," I said, and the words sounded steadier than I felt.
By the time Paolo walked through the bell above the door, carrying the cold smell of the street, the shop had emptied and the late light made everything golden. He paused when he saw me. For one breath I forgot how to move.
He was wrong for normality: tailored wool clung to broad shoulders, shadow at his jaw, breath warm with the city's air. I couldn't stop watching the way his shirt pulled across his back when he shifted. My skin answered before my brain did—pulse quick, a small ache at my ribs.
"Rosa." His voice fell into the room and my knees remembered an old steadiness.
"You saw this?" I asked, holding up the scrap.
He didn't flinch. He folded his hands at his waist in that careful way he had. "Yes."
There. His admission was small, a fact like a stone dropped into water. Ripples spread across my face.
"When?"
"Last night," he said. "Or the night before; my sense of time is...broken." He rubbed the back of his neck, a habit I had started to catalog. "Someone posted a photo. I can't swear to everything. I wasn't there in a continuous string of memory."
"You weren't there," I echoed. The scrape of the word felt sharp. "You keep saying that, and it's not enough. 'I can't swear'—that's not an answer, Paolo."
He stepped closer. Up close, his scent—woodsmoke and something sharp—wrapped me. He was dangerous in a different way now: the promise of protection and the reminder that he existed in a world I had tried to leave.
"I wasn't him," he said. "If he hurt your?—"
"If he?" My laugh was brittle. "Paolo, you told me you had flashes tied to a woman named Isabella and a chapel. You told me soil was in your hands. Those are not vague details."
He flinched. "I know."
"Do you know whether you hurt her?" The question left me raw.
His hazel eyes narrowed. For a moment the old armor tightened, then slipped. "I have fragments," he said. "Images that don't line up. A stone wall. Moonlight on an old chapel door. My hands—covered in dirt. A single name and then nothing. I wake and there's guilt like a mouth full of sand."
His honesty landed on me as if he'd thrown down a handful of pebbles. They stung. Some part of me wanted to accept him, to fold his discomfort into something we could heal together. Another part tightened like a fist around a wound.
"Do you understand why I would be terrified?" I whispered.
"Terrified of what?" His voice dropped. "That I'll leave again? That I'm dangerous? That forgiving me erases the person who was wronged?"
"All of it." I swallowed. "Forgiving you feels like erasing the reasons I survived."
He reached for my wrist, fingers warm, and steadied me. The contact was electric. My pulse leapt; I felt him more than I heard him. "I don't want you to erase anything," he said. "I want to be allowed to prove I'm not that man now."
"Prove." The word tasted like a dare. "You keep asking me to test you. To demand small domestic things to see if you can be dependable. But what if your past isn't a habit you can break with jasmine and phone silence? What if it's a choice you won't make?"
He closed his eyes. "Then I will choose you every day. I will plant the jasmine, I will answer my phone less, I will cook dinners?—"
"It's not about cooking." My hands fluttered. "Paolo—it's about whether you will be honest without me having to squeeze it out of you. Whether you will tell me the worst and not protect yourself from pain."
His jaw worked. "I'm trying to be honest."
"You're picking details," I said. "Fragments that make you sympathetic. You're not telling me how you feel when you see someone I used to love mentioned in the papers. You're not telling me whether you ever looked at him and?—"
I didn't finish. The back of my throat tightened.
He moved then, closing the space with a single step. His breath fanned my face. "Rosa," he said low. "Stop testing me."
I pulled away. "I'm not testing you. I'm surviving."
"I won't be broken again," he said, quieter. "Not by ghosts, not by what I might have done, not by anyone telling me I'm allowed or not allowed to be better."
"I don't want to break you," I said. "I don't want to be the reason you hide the worst of yourself. But I can't be the one who chooses for both of us."
Silence pooled between us. It was the kind of silence that could hold tenderness or explode.
He reached for me again, and this time I did not pull away. His hand moved to the small of my back and there was a tenderness in it that made something ache behind my ribs. "You make it hard," he said in a whisper. "You make wanting you dangerous."
"You make wanting you harder," I shot back, breathless.
He smiled, that small soft thing that lit his eyes. "Fair."
The argument soured into something hungry. We were dangerously close to where we never should go during a fight: mouth against mouth to forgive or wound. He pressed his forehead to mine. Heat pooled in my belly.
"Don't," I said, because reason was still possible. "Please."
His fingers tangled in the knot of my hair, thumbs brushing the column of my neck.
There was a want in him—fast, urgent—and it matched the want crowding my chest. My mouth went dry.
For a wild second the room narrowed to the press of his hands, the tilt of his lips.
I pictured our mouths exploring apologies; the thought made me dizzy.
He bent, cupped my face, and kissed me—slow, searching. The backroom door creaked, the shop hummed with the last light. His mouth was firm and careful, then grew greedy, claiming space I had kept closed for so long.
My hands slid up his chest, feeling the braced muscles beneath cloth. I couldn't stop myself from thinking messy things about the line of his collarbone, the roughness of stubble against my thumb, the heat of his body. My breath hitched. For a moment everything folded into softness.
Then the memory of my other loss stabbed through: a man who had promised and vanished, a betrayal that had left my hands empty.
My chest tightened; oxygen thinned. Kissing him felt like stepping on a wire.
If I crossed this line and he walked away—if this was a seduction of my own making—I would be ruined.
I broke the kiss with a quiet apology. "I can't," I whispered, pulling back.
He didn't let go of me. His hands trembled. "Rosa—tell me what you need," he pleaded.
I wiped a hand over my face and tasted his mouth on my fingers. "I need honesty," I said. "Not fragments. Not tests. Tell me everything you remember. Tell me everything you don't. Let me choose with full knowledge, not with guesses."
He looked as if he'd been struck. "You want all of it?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
He nodded, slow. "Okay."
We sat on the edge of the worktable, knees almost touching, the argument softening into something hollow and eager.
He began, halting, small details scattered between longer silences.
He told me about the chapel, the name that surfaced—Isabella—and the smell of wet stone.
He said there were men I didn't know in some memories and a crate that clinked when it moved.
He named shame and the taste of fear. He did not say he had hurt her.
He did not absolve himself with easy excuses. He offered pieces and raw edges.
Halfway through, his phone buzzed on the table. He ignored it. The buzz kept going—persistent, then insistent. Finally, he glanced at the screen and his face went flat.
"Matteo," he said. A word I did not need translated.
"Say it," I said.
He pressed the phone face down. "He's reminding me of responsibilities. Saying I can't let memory make me soft."
That look—old loyalty like iron—made my stomach turn. "So he wants the Romeo who remembers nothing but obeys everything."
"He's afraid," Paolo said. "Of weakness. Of losing control."
"Of us," I said.
He reached for me, an open, pleading hand. "Rosa, stay."
"How can I stay when people are saying you were there? That you were involved?" My voice cracked.
"Because appearances lie." He took my hand anyway, steadying, pressing his thumb over my knuckles. His skin was warm; his fingers were big and sure. "Because I choose to be here. Because I am trying. I won't—" His voice caught. "I won't hide the worst from you."
I wanted to believe the words. I wanted to fold into him and let his breath lesson the ache. But tests had been my armor for years. Asking him to prove himself with a week of jasmine or a cooked dinner had been safer than risking a whole heart.
"I'm tired," I said. "I'm tired of being the judge."
He closed his eyes and lowered his forehead to mine. "Then don't be."
The phone buzzed again, louder. He looked at it for a heartbeat, then stood. "I should go."
"You should stay," I said, surprising both of us. "Stay until I can think."
He hesitated. "I can't stay all night. There are...calls I have to return."
"I know." I rubbed my thumb along the metal band at my throat without meaning to. "Then stay an hour."
He smiled, a small, grateful thing. "An hour."
We arranged other small pacts—no promises we couldn't keep—until the hour lengthened and the shop grew dim. When he left, he took my hand and pressed a quick, possessive kiss to the base of my thumb. "I'll be back," he said.
Minutes after he walked out, a small packet sat on the counter where he'd been. I didn't open it at first. Part of me wanted the space he offered; part of me needed proof he wouldn't vanish again.
Inside was a tiny bouquet of wildflowers—oxeye daisies and a stray sprig of rosemary—tied with twine. A note in his block, careful hand read: For when you decide to let me try again.
No pleading. No demand. No marker to collect it. He'd left without watching me accept or refuse. The restraint hit me harder than any grand gesture.
I pressed the paper to my chest until my breath slowed. My fingers smelled of rosemary; my eyes gathered wet.
Outside, the piazza lamp was already lit. I walked out to clear air, to hold my hands steady. The night smelled of citrus and the sea. People moved in small shadows; someone laughed somewhere far off.
He followed. He always followed when I needed space and when I didn't.
"Rosa," he said when he closed the distance. He stopped a pace away, not touching. The streetlight painted his face in half-gold.
"I'm tired of walking on eggshells," I said.
"Then step off the eggshells," he answered, as if the solution were simple and as if I'd never tried.
"My heart isn't an experiment," I said. "It's not something you can risk."
"I know." He took a breath, and for the first time the plea in his voice stripped away all performance. "Tell me what you need to know."
I looked at him—really looked—at the pale scar at his neck, the line of his throat, the way his lips trembled. Desire flared and folded into fear. "I need the truth," I said.
He stepped forward and reached for my hand.
I turned my face away and let the words fall into the open night. "I need the truth," I said again.
He froze, fingers brushing mine.
"Tell me everything," I whispered.
He opened his mouth, and the street seemed to hold its breath.
Then his phone rang—sharp, unfamiliar—and he flinched. He fumbled, eyes wide, and I watched his hand shake as he swiped at the screen.
"I—" he began.
I couldn't hear who was calling. He looked at me, words tangled. "I have to?—"
I pulled my hand free. "No," I said. "Not now."
He stood there, the light painting him a statue of incertitude. "Rosa?—"
"I need the truth," I said again, and this time I left the sentence thin and final between us. He swallowed. He reached for me anyway, and his hand hovered near my shoulder.
"Tell me the truth," I repeated, softer, and when he opened his mouth the ring of his phone cut through both of us, a brusque, urgent sound from a world I was not sure I fit into.
He looked at the phone, at me, at the shadowed piazza. His fingers closed around the device. His eyes sought mine like a man trying to remember a name.
"Please," he said. "Wait."
I stepped back. The night hummed. He was still reaching; his words were already unravelling into the small, dangerous world that would decide us.
"Tell me the truth," I said once more.
He swallowed and began to speak, but the words that came were not explanations. They were fragments, quick and jagged, and they landed at my feet like broken shells.