8. Mel
— ? —
Mel
Present Day
I walk through the villa one last time at four in the morning, the hour’s drive from the estate behind me, and I make myself look at all of it.
The glass wall that turns the whole of Florence into a painting we paid a fortune to own and then stopped seeing.
The marble island where a housekeeper I was never allowed to help left breakfast for two that only one of us ever ate.
The wine fridge stocked with bottles worth more than the car I learned to drive in.
The closet the size of my childhood bedroom, full of dresses chosen by a stylist to make me look like a woman who belonged here.
I used to stand in rooms like this and feel like an impostor waiting to be caught.
Now I just feel the cold of the floor through my socks and think: none of it was ever mine.
It was a costume, and the play is closing.
It should be harder to leave eight thousand square feet of the most beautiful things I’ll ever touch. It isn’t. That’s how I know for sure.
The last thing I pack is the ring.
Everything else takes ten minutes, one suitcase, the clothes that were mine before I was a Bianchi, the toiletries, done.
I leave the sweater he bought me in Florence.
I leave the dog-eared book of poetry off my nightstand.
I leave the framed photo of us at the harvest festival, his arm around me, both of us laughing at a joke I can’t remember anymore.
I can’t carry proof of what we were across an ocean while I’m running from what we’ve become.
But the ring won’t come off.
Three years it’s been on my finger, through showers and sleep and ten thousand small ordinary mornings, and it clings like it knows, like the metal itself is arguing with me. I twist it. I run my knuckle under the tap. And when it finally gives, my whole hand looks wrong. Naked. Amputated.
I carry it into the bedroom we used to share, the one he stopped sleeping in months ago, and I stand over the bed for a long time with that little circle of gold in my palm.
There are things I could do with it. Leave a note under it. Throw it in his face when he lands. Keep it, sell it, hurl it into the sea somewhere over the Atlantic.
Instead I set it on his pillow. Dead center, where he can’t miss it. Where the first thing he’ll understand when he walks into this room is that I understood him first.
Then I make myself let go of it, and my fingers don’t want to, and I have to physically pull my hand back like it’s caught on a hook.
“Goodbye,” I say, to a man who isn’t there, to a marriage that isn’t either.
And I leave before I can pick it back up.
***
Getting out is easy in the way that breaks your heart, no one tries to stop me.
A pre-dawn taxi I paid cash for so it wouldn’t trip any of the family’s alerts.
A one-way seat booked on a card still in my maiden name.
Twelve hours over the Atlantic where I sleep, finally, the dead dreamless sleep of a body that’s been bracing for a blow that already landed.
Somewhere below me the ocean, and somewhere behind it Santino stepping off a plane in Tokyo, not yet knowing his wife is gone, not yet knowing about the ring waiting on his pillow.
I don’t let myself wonder whether he’ll feel anything when he finds it.
That question has teeth, and I’ve bled enough.
Texas hits me like a wall of wet heat the second I step off the plane, nothing like Italy, everything I need it to be: big and loud and anonymous, a country that has never heard the name Bianchi.
I rent the cheapest car on the lot and I drive with no destination except away from cities, into hill country that rolls out green and endless, through little towns with names like Marigold and Primrose that look like they fell out of a Hallmark movie.
Then a sign: WISTERIA, TEXAS, POPULATION 2,847. WELCOME HOME.
I don’t decide to stop. The car just slows, like the word home reached out and put its hand on the wheel.
Tree-lined main street. A diner, a hardware store, people waving at each other across the road, not one of them looking at me like I don’t belong.
I park by the general store to breathe, and that’s when I see it, hand-lettered on the bulletin board: HELP WANTED, ADMIN, GOLDEN APPLE ORCHARD. CALL HATTIE.
Office work. The kind a pregnant, heartbroken woman can do with the half of her brain that still functions.
I dial before I can talk myself out of it, get a voice like gravel and iron that tells me to come out to the big red barn and not to waste her time, and an hour later I’m turning up a gravel drive toward the rest of my life.
***
Hattie is exactly what she sounds like.
Seventy-something, with silver hair pulled back in a practical braid and hands that look like they’ve done every kind of work there is. She’s standing in the doorway of the big red barn when I pull up, arms crossed, watching me with eyes that miss nothing.
I get out of the car.
She doesn’t move.
“You’re the girl from Italy,” she says. Not a question.
“Yes ma’am.”
“You look like hell.”
I almost laugh. “I know.”
“You been crying?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“About a week straight.”
She studies me for a moment longer, taking in my wrinkled clothes and my one suitcase and my red-rimmed eyes that have given up trying to hide anything.
“Come inside,” she says finally. “Let’s talk.”
The office is small and cluttered, stacked with papers and seed catalogs and a coffee maker that looks like it’s been in use since the Reagan administration. Hattie points me to a chair and lowers herself into the one behind the desk.
“So,” she says. “Tell me about this vineyard that didn’t work out.”
I take a breath. “I married into the family that owned it. It was… complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“The family didn’t want me there. And eventually my husband didn’t either.”
Her expression doesn’t change. “You pregnant?”
So much for small talk. I open my mouth to deny it, then close it again.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “I just found out.”
“Father know?”
“He knows.” My voice goes flat. “He doesn’t care.”
“Huh.” She leans back in her chair, studies me some more. “You looking to disappear or you looking to rebuild?”
I consider the question seriously. “Rebuild, I think. I just need somewhere to do it.”
“And you think that’s here? In my orchard? In my town?”
“I think I need a job and you need an admin.” I meet her eyes. “I work hard. I show up. I don’t make excuses. Give me a chance and I’ll prove it.”
She’s silent long enough that I start to sweat.
Then she nods.
“Job’s yours,” she says. “Eight to five, Monday through Saturday. Pay’s not much but it’s fair. You start tomorrow.”
The relief that floods through me is so intense I almost cry again. “Thank you. I won’t let you down.”
“See that you don’t.” She stands, and I think the conversation is over, but then she pauses at the door. “You got somewhere to stay?”
“Not yet. I was going to look for-”
“There’s a room in the farmhouse.” She cuts me off like the decision’s already been made. “Nothing fancy, but it’s clean and the bed’s comfortable. Supper’s at six sharp. I don’t hold food for people who can’t be bothered to show up on time.”
“Mrs. - I’m sorry, I don’t know your last name.”
“Just Hattie. And don’t argue.” She gives me a look that brooks no argument. “You’ve got one suitcase and eyes that haven’t been dry in a week. You need a roof and a meal, and I’ve got both. That’s the end of the discussion.”
I stare at her. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you helping me? You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
Her expression shifts. Almost soft.
“I know enough,” she says. “I know what it looks like when someone’s running from the thing that almost broke them.
And I know what it feels like to need someone - anyone - to give you a chance when the whole world’s decided you’re not worth one.
” She opens the door. “Come on. I’ll show you the room.
You look like you’re about to fall over. ”
I follow her out of the barn, into the golden afternoon light, and I let myself be adopted.
Effectively at gunpoint.
By a grandmother I’ve known for all of twenty minutes.
***
That night, I lie in my new bed in my new room in a house that belongs to a woman I just met, and I let myself cry for Santino one last time.
The whole storm of it.
The cave behind the waterfall, his body warm against mine. The pigeon that started everything. The way he used to look at me like I was the answer to a question he’d been asking his whole life.
The way he stopped looking at me at all.
I cry until my chest aches, until my throat is raw, until there’s nothing left inside me but empty space and the quiet flutter of new life trying to grow there.
And when it’s done, it’s done.
I get up and wash my face. Then I stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, red-eyed and blotchy and absolutely wrecked, and I make myself a promise.
I won’t cry for him again.
Whatever I was, whoever I loved, whatever I thought my life was going to be, it’s over. It has to be over. I can’t carry it anymore.
Tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll start my new job and I’ll build a life here, in this little town, in this orchard, in this life that has nothing to do with Santino Bianchi or his family or the woman I used to be when I loved him.
Someone new, starting at sunrise.
But tonight, just tonight, I let myself grieve.
And then I let it go.