16. Mel
— ? —
Mel
Chiara arrives like a hurricane with luggage.
I hear the car before I see it, some kind of rental, pulling up the gravel drive at a speed that suggests she broke every traffic law between here and Austin.
The door flies open before the engine stops, and then she’s running across the yard in heels that shouldn’t work on this terrain, arms already outstretched -
“MEL!”
I barely have time to set down the basket of apples before she slams into me. The hug bends me backward, she’s always been a full-contact hugger, all or nothing, and then she’s gripping my face with both hands and there are tears on her cheeks.
“Let me look at you. Oh my God, let me look at you-” She’s examining me like I’m a painting she hasn’t seen in years, turning my face this way and that. “You look good. You look healthy. Your hair got longer - I love it. Are you sleeping? You have to be sleeping, your skin is amazing-”
“Chiara-”
“Where are they? Where are my niblings? I need to see them right now, immediately, take me to them or I’ll tear this orchard apart-”
“They’re inside. Chiara, slow down-”
“I can’t slow down. I’ve been on a plane for eleven hours thinking about this moment and I absolutely can’t slow down.” She grabs my hand and starts pulling me toward the house. “Come on. Come on come on come on-”
I let her drag me.
It feels good. It feels like coming home to a version of home I’d forgotten existed, this whirlwind of energy and love and complete lack of boundaries. I’ve missed her so much that seeing her hurts, like pressing on a bruise I’d forgotten I had.
Inside, the twins are in their playpen. Leo is building an incomprehensible tower with blocks. Junie is “reading” a book, which means turning the pages very seriously and babbling to herself.
Chiara stops in the doorway. Her hand tightens on mine.
“Oh,” she breathes. “Oh.”
“Chiara, this is Leo and Junie. Babies, this is your Auntie Chiara.”
Leo looks up, grins, and immediately reaches for her. “UP!”
Chiara makes a sound that’s half-sob, half-laugh and practically vaults into the playpen. She scoops Leo into her arms and presses her face against his hair and just, cries. Full-body crying, the kind that shakes her shoulders and makes her breath hitch.
Leo, unperturbed, pats her head. “Sad?”
“Happy,” Chiara chokes out. “So happy, piccolo. So, so happy.”
Junie watches all of this with her careful green eyes. She doesn’t reach for Chiara, she never reaches first, but when Chiara finally puts Leo down and turns to her, Junie surprises us both.
She holds out her book.
“Read?”
Chiara loses it completely.
I have to leave the room to give her privacy to fall apart, but I can hear her from the kitchen, hiccuping sobs and Italian endearments and Leo’s delighted “again! again!” as she apparently starts reading to them.
By the time she emerges, she looks like a disaster, mascara smeared, cheeks blotchy, hair escaping from whatever elegant style she started with, and she’s never been more beautiful to me.
“They’re perfect,” she says. “They’re so perfect. I hate that I missed so much. I hate that-” She stops. Takes a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m making this about me.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” She crosses the kitchen in three steps and hugs me again, gentler this time. “I should have tried harder to find you. I should have-”
“You couldn’t have found me. I made sure of it.”
“But I should have tried-”
“Chiara.” I pull back so I can look at her. “You did try. I know you did. I wasn’t ready to be found.”
She searches my face. Whatever she finds makes her nod, slowly.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Then we start from here.”
***
That night, the twins go down easy.
I think Chiara wore them out, she spent the entire afternoon on the floor with them, building block towers and reading books and letting Leo climb on her like she was playground equipment.
Junie even warmed up to her eventually, patting Chiara’s face with both hands and declaring “pretty” with the solemnity of a judge delivering a verdict.
Now the house is quiet. The twins are asleep. Chiara and I are at the kitchen table with bowls of ramen, the instant kind, the only thing I had energy to make, and two years of distance between us.
“So,” Chiara says. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Everything.” She waves her chopsticks. “I want the whole story. From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
I take a breath. Let it out slowly.
And then, for the first time in two years, I tell someone everything.
I skip the sanitized version, the one I’ve repeated to myself so many times it’s lost all its edges, and give her the real one, raw and ugly and full of all the parts I’ve never said out loud.
I tell her about the dinners. How they’d speak Italian around me, in front of me, about me. How I’d sit there like a ghost at my own table, watching Allegra’s hand on Santino’s arm and his mother’s poisonous smiles and his complete failure to notice any of it.
Chiara’s face goes tight. “I tried to tell him. So many times.”
“I know.”
“He didn’t listen. He never listened about family stuff.”
“I know that too.”
I tell her about the photos. The way Vittoria and Allegra walked into my bedroom without knocking and laid them out like evidence in a trial, Santino and Allegra at our lake, at our place, the waterfall behind them and their bodies close and his hand at her waist. How clinical Allegra’s voice was when she offered me dates and room numbers, like she was reading a travel itinerary.
“That’s not-” Chiara shakes her head violently. “That’s impossible. He never-”
“I know what I saw, Chiara.”
“No.” Her voice is fierce. “Listen to me. Those photos were faked. They had to be. Santino has never - never - touched Allegra. He doesn’t even like her. He thinks she’s vapid and annoying and he only worked with her because of the merger.”
“She was always touching him.”
“And he was always pulling away! God, Mel, I saw it. Every dinner, every event - she’d hang on him and he’d go stiff as a board. I thought you noticed. I thought-” She stops. “Of course you noticed. That’s why you believed the photos.”
The logic of it hits me like a wave. All those times I watched Allegra drape herself over my husband, telling myself it was fine, it was nothing, he wasn’t responding -
But what if I was wrong? What if his stiffness wasn’t discomfort but guilt?
“Tell me more,” Chiara says quietly. “What else did she do?”
So I tell her about the clinic.
The memory still makes me nauseous, the private waiting room with its soft lighting and softer music, the way Vittoria’s hand closed around my elbow as she guided me inside.
How the tests were run before I even understood what they were testing for.
How it was Vittoria, not me, who found out first that I was pregnant.
“She had the results sent to her,” I say. “Before I even knew. She made sure she’d know first.”
“Puttana,” Chiara spits. “Fucking puttana.”
“And then she gave me the divorce papers,” I continue.
“Said Santino had signed them before he left for Tokyo. That he wanted it done quietly, no fuss, no scandal. She told me the family would take the baby and raise it themselves - that a Bianchi heir wasn’t going to be raised by a runaway harvest worker.
That if I stayed and fought, I’d lose, because the Bianchis have resources I can’t imagine. ”
“The papers were forged.”
“I know. Santino told me.”
“My mother forged my father’s signature once, for a property deal. I recognized the technique when we found the petition.” Chiara wipes her eyes with her sleeve. “She’s been doing this for years. Controlling people, manipulating documents, destroying anyone who threatens her precious family image.”
I stare at my ramen. It’s gone cold.
“Tell him,” Chiara says suddenly.
“What?”
“Tell Santino. Everything you just told me - he needs to know.” She reaches across the table and grabs my hands. “Mel, I can swear to the parts I know. He never did any of it. The papers were forged. There was never anything with Allegra. It was all our mother - all of it.”
“Chiara-”
“His only crime, and I’m not minimizing it-” She squeezes my hands.
“His only crime is being a workaholic who never learned to put limits on Allegra or the job. He was oblivious and neglectful and he let his family treat you terribly. Those are real things. But the affair? The photos? The conspiracy? None of that was him.”
I want to believe her. I want it so badly it sits in my chest like a stone.
But wanting isn’t the same as trusting.
“He’s changed,” Chiara continues. “You’ve seen the outside of it. I saw the inside - the first six months he barely spoke, and then he did nothing but this. Finding you. Fixing himself. Becoming someone who deserves you. He’s different, Mel. I swear it on our shared face.”
I pull my hands back. Set them flat on the table.
“I’m scared,” I say.
It’s the truest thing I have.
“I’m so scared, Chiara. And it’s not just me anymore.” I look toward the hallway, toward the room where my children are sleeping. “I have the twins. If I let him in and he hurts me again - I wouldn’t just be risking my own heart. I’d be risking theirs.”
Chiara nods. She doesn’t argue, doesn’t dismiss my fear, doesn’t tell me I’m being ridiculous. She just accepts it.
“Then put him on trial,” she says.
“What?”
“Let him prove it. Piece by piece, day by day. Make him earn every inch of trust.” Her eyes are fierce. “And if he fails at any of it - if he lies or pushes or falls back into old patterns - I’ll personally help you kick his ass, and we’ll raise the kids together as besties.”
A laugh escapes me. Wet and shaky, but real.
“You’d do that?”
“In a heartbeat.” She grins. “I’ve already got the spare room set up. Been keeping it ready just in case.”
“Just in case of what?”
“Just in case you needed somewhere to land. Just in case you came back.” Her voice softens. “I never stopped hoping, Mel. Not once.”
I stare at her across the table, this woman who’s been my best friend since the first week I arrived in Italy, who warned me about Vittoria, who tried so hard to protect me from a family she knew better than anyone.
“I’d like that,” I hear myself say. “The bestie backup plan.”
“It’s a standing offer.” She raises her ramen bowl like a toast. “To kicking ass and raising babies, whichever comes first.”
I raise mine too. We clink.
Chiara sets her bowl down and studies me for a second too long. “Can I ask you something that isn’t about my brother?”
“That would be a nice change of pace.”
“What do you want? Forget the twins for a second, forget him. What do you want for you?”
The question lands somewhere I keep locked.
I open my mouth to deflect, and instead, for the first time in years, I tell the truth.
“I was going to do grad school. Ag business. Before Italy, before all of it, I had this whole plan - I wanted to run a place. Build a thing with my name on it.” I laugh at myself.
“I came to Tuscany for one harvest season to save up. That was the plan. One season.”
“And then you fell into a billionaire.”
“And then I fell into a billionaire, and I put the whole thing in a drawer.” I turn my empty bowl in my hands.
“Hattie’s books were the first time in three years my brain felt like mine again.
I’ve got ideas for this orchard, Chiara.
Real ones. A cidery. A tasting room. Turning the record-apple thing into an actual brand instead of a fluke in the county paper.
I could triple what this place brings in. ”
Chiara is looking at me like I’ve just announced I’m running for president and she’s already planning the campaign. “Then do that.”
“It’s not my orchard.”
“So build the part that’s yours.” She shrugs like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “You don’t need anyone’s permission to want things, Mel. Not his. Not even Hattie’s.”
I don’t answer that. But I don’t forget it, either.
And later, lying in bed with the house quiet around me, I let myself hold a feeling I haven’t touched in two years.
Hope.
Careful and small, like a new seedling.
Could it be true? Could it really all have been a lie, and his only sin the neglect?
Which isn’t a small sin. The dinners where he didn’t defend me, the late nights with work, the way he let his family circle like sharks while he was too absorbed in spreadsheets to notice. Those things happened. Those things were real.
But neglect might be survivable.
Neglect can change.
I fall asleep thinking about trials and proofs and the way Santino looked at Leo like he was holding a relic.
And for the first time in two years -
I dream about a life other than running away.