21. Mel
— ? —
Mel
Leo is burning up.
I know it the second I lift him out of his crib from the nap that ran too long, he’s a furnace against my chest, cheeks flushed dark, eyes glassy and half-focused, and when I press my lips to his forehead the way Hattie taught me, the heat of him makes my stomach drop through the floor.
“Hey, bug.” I keep my voice light even as my pulse spikes. “You feeling rotten?”
He whimpers, which is how I know it’s bad, because Leo doesn’t whimper. Leo laughs at thunder and tries to eat bees.
The thermometer reads 103.2. Then, ninety seconds later, 104.1.
“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay okay okay.” I’m already moving, Leo on my hip, digging one-handed for infant Tylenol, running the math I swore I’d never have to run, how far the hospital is, whether Hattie has the truck, where my keys are. “You’re okay. Mama’s got you.”
And then his whole body goes stiff in my arms.
His eyes roll. His little limbs start to jerk, rhythmic and wrong, and a sound comes out of me that I’ve never made before in my life.
“HATTIE!”
I get him onto the living room rug on his side because some deep, terrified animal part of my brain remembers that’s what you do, and I’m counting, I don’t even know why I’m counting, some instinct, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, and Hattie is suddenly there, and she takes one look and says “seizure, febrile, it’s the fever spiking, keep him on his side” in a voice so flat and certain it’s the only thing keeping me from shattering.
It lasts forty seconds. It lasts a geological age. It lasts long enough for me to understand, with perfect clarity, that there’s no version of my life I wouldn’t set on fire to keep this small person breathing.
Then it stops. He goes limp. And I’ve got my phone out and I’m calling the one number my thumb finds without asking.
“Mel?”
“Leo had a seizure.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “His fever - it spiked, he seized, he’s - Santino, we’re going to the hospital, I need-”
“I’m already in the truck.” I hear his door slam, the engine turn over, gravel. He must have been at his place a mile off and he’s already moving. “Talk to me. Is he breathing?”
“Yes. He’s breathing, he’s floppy but he’s breathing-”
“Good. That’s good, that’s normal after, that’s - Mel, listen to me, febrile seizures look like the end of the world and they almost never are. My cousin had them. Okay? I’m ninety seconds out. Get him in the truck. I’m driving you both.”
I don’t remember the drive. What stays: Hattie in the back with Junie, who’s silent and enormous-eyed and clutching her rabbit.
Santino’s hand leaving the gearshift to grip my knee at every red light, his jaw set, saying my name and Leo’s name in a low steady rotation like a rosary.
I remember Leo starting to cry halfway there, a normal, outraged, feeling-terrible cry, and how it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
***
The ER doctor is calm the way Dr. Reyes was calm two years ago, and this time I’m not alone in the corridor being erased.
This time there’s a very large tattooed man sitting beside me with our daughter asleep on his chest, and when the doctor comes out to say the words simple febrile seizure and completely benign and he’s already perking up and we’ll get that fever down and send you home tonight, I don’t fold in on myself.
I turn, and I put my face into Santino’s neck, and he wraps the arm that isn’t holding Junie all the way around me, and I fall apart quietly against him while he holds all three of us together in a plastic hospital chair.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs into my hair. “I’ve got all of you. Nobody is taking me out of this chair.”
And here is the terrifying, clarifying truth of it: I believe him. Completely. Somewhere in the last forty seconds and the last mile and the last two years, the question stopped being whether he’d stay.
Later, when Leo is dosed and drowsy and demanding “Santi hold” from the hospital crib, Santino picks him up with a care that makes the nurse’s face go soft, and my son fists a hand in his father’s shirt and sleeps.
I watch them. And I think: oh. Oh, no. I’m all the way back in love with him, and I don’t even want to fight it anymore.
***
He asked me on a date two days later, once Leo was fully back to eating bees and mocking thunder.
A real one. Not the festival, not a tumble in a sunflower field. An actual, planned, asked-in-advance date with a specific time and everything.
And he was nervous when he asked.
NERVOUS. Santino Bianchi, who once negotiated a billion-euro merger while simultaneously ordering room service, stood in Hattie’s kitchen the morning Leo got the all-clear and said “Would you want to have dinner with me? At my place? This weekend?” with the exact same energy as a teenage boy asking his crush to prom.
I said yes.
Now I’m standing in front of my closet at four in the afternoon, surrounded by rejected outfits, having what can only be described as a complete psychological breakdown.
“You’ve tried on that dress three times,” Chiara observes from the doorway.
“It looked different each time.”
“It really didn’t.”
“Maybe it’s the lighting.”
“It’s not the lighting. It’s the panic.” She crosses her arms. “Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t leave. “So you’re nervous.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“You didn’t say that. You said no, which I interpreted as ‘please push gently until I crack.’”
I sink onto the bed, the rejected dress pooling around me like a deflated parachute.
“I want to forgive him,” I say quietly.
“Okay.”
“I want to forgive him and forget all of it and just… be happy again. Be a family again.” My voice cracks slightly. “And that scares the hell out of me.”
Chiara sits down beside me. Doesn’t say anything. Just waits.
“Because I can’t forget,” I continue. “Even if I forgive him, I can’t forget the years I spent alone. The years he missed. The reasons I left in the first place.”
“They were good reasons.”
“They were.” I pick at a loose thread on the dress. “But I’m watching him, Chiara. Every day. And so far…”
“So far what?”
“So far, yes. Yes on every line. He’s so good with the twins it hurts to watch. He’s present in a way he never was before. A better partner in a month than the last year of the marriage.” I pause. “Also - and I really resent this data point - he’s SO hot now it’s genuinely unfair.”
Chiara laughs. “I noticed.”
“When did he get abs? He didn’t have abs before.
Now he has abs plural.” I drag a pillow over my face and groan into it.
“Yesterday he was fixing the fence and he had his shirt off and I forgot a whole sentence. Mid-word, Chiara. I was giving him instructions about the north gate and my brain just - buffered. Because of a hipbone. A single hipbone.”
“Grief gym. Two years of it.”
“It’s inconsiderate. I’m trying to be emotionally complex and cautious and appropriately guarded, and he’s walking around looking like a thirst trap with a tool belt, and every time he lifts a bale my body files a formal complaint.”
“Your body has good taste.”
“My body is a traitor and I’ve told it so.”
I flop back on the bed and stare at the ceiling. “What if I’m being stupid? What if this is all a mistake?”
“What if it’s not?” Chiara’s voice is gentle. “What if he’s actually changed? What if you can have the life you wanted?”
“That’s terrifying.”
“I know.” She pats my knee. “But you’ve been terrified before and survived. You can survive hope too.”
***
Santino
I’ve negotiated deals worth more than the GDP of small nations without breaking a sweat, and I’ve spent the last four hours in a state of low-grade panic over pasta.
The pici is the third batch. The first two are, as I told her I’d tell her, buried with honors, one seized into cement, one that somehow came out both gummy and hard as a shoe, a culinary achievement I didn’t know was possible.
I learned the recipe from a seventy-year-old nonna on the internet who doesn’t know I exist and whom I now consider a mentor and a mother figure.
The string lights took two hours and a trip to the hardware store where the man behind the counter watched me buy every warm-white strand in stock with the expression of someone witnessing a crime.
The wine I had shipped from a cellar in Montalcino, our year, the one she cried through her vows drinking.
I’ve set two places at a table I bought yesterday, next to a couch Dorothy talked me into the day before, because until this week I owned a house with a mattress and nothing else, and I’ve changed my shirt three times, and when I open the door and she’s standing there in the green dress with her hair down, I forget every single thing I rehearsed.
“Did you-” Her voice catches. “Did you cook?”
“Pici.” I hear how nervous I sound and hate it. “I learned from a nonna on the internet. The first two batches were buried with honors.”
She turns in a slow circle, taking it all in, the lights, the table, the wine, and I watch her face the way I used to watch merger boards, reading every micro-shift, except this matters infinitely more than any deal ever did and I have no leverage and no exit strategy and no plan except please, God, let this be right.
“Santino…”
And I panic. “If it’s too much, we can go somewhere. There’s a restaurant in town, or-”
“It’s perfect.”
The relief hits me so hard I have to breathe through it. “Yeah?”
“It’s perfect.” She trails her fingers over the linen. “When did you have time to do all this?”
“I started this morning. After you agreed.”
“This MORNING?”
“I was motivated.” Understatement of my life. I’ve thought about almost nothing else since she said yes in Hattie’s kitchen with our son’s fever finally broken and I split wide open at how close I came to being useless in the one moment she needed me.
She laughs, that surprised, helpless sound, the one I’ve been hoarding like a miser since the cider press, and clocks the wine label. “The wine is from our wedding year.”
“I remember you liked it.”