27. Mel #2
The crowd gathers. The whole town, it feels like, all these people who barely knew me two years ago, who watched me stumble into Wisteria broken and terrified and pregnant, who gave me a home without asking for anything in return.
Santino moves to stand beside me, one hand on the small of my back.
“Happy birthday to you…”
The singing starts, off-key and enthusiastic, and the twins react in their usual ways. Leo shrieks with joy, bouncing in his seat, clapping his tiny hands. Junie watches with those serious green eyes, taking it all in, processing.
“Happy birthday to you…”
I look at my children, these impossible miracles, these small humans who didn’t exist two years ago and who are now the center of my entire universe, and my eyes burn.
“Happy birthday, dear Leo and Junie…”
Santino’s hand tightens on my back.
“Happy birthday to you!”
The song ends. The candles flicker. I lean in to help the twins blow them out, and in the chaos of applause and cheering -
“Papà!”
The world stops.
Leo is pointing at Santino, face split in a huge grin, chubby finger jabbing at his father’s chest. “Papà! Papà!”
But that’s not what makes my heart seize.
It’s Junie.
My serious, cautious, slow-to-trust girl, who watches the world like she’s waiting for it to prove itself, who has never called anyone anything except a handful of carefully chosen sounds -
She reaches out her arms toward Santino.
“Papà,” she says. Soft. Sure. Like she’s been waiting to say it, waiting until she was certain, waiting until she knew he would stay.
Santino goes completely still.
His face breaks open, joy and grief and wonder and a pain so deep it must have been there for years, buried under everything else. His eyes fill. His jaw works. And then he’s moving, scooping Junie out of her high chair, holding her against his chest like she’s the most precious thing in the world.
“Papà,” she says again, patting his cheek.
A tear tracks down his face.
Then another.
He doesn’t wipe them away. He just holds our daughter and cries in front of everyone we know, and no one says a word, because some moments are too sacred for words.
“Papà’s here,” he manages. His voice cracks. “Papà’s always going to be here.”
Leo, not to be outdone, starts chanting it, over and over, drumming his hands on the tray to keep time.
Santino laughs, a wet, broken sound, and reaches for him too. And then he’s holding both of our children, one in each arm, while they pat his face and say the word that just changed everything.
I’m crying too. I didn’t even notice when I started.
Hattie appears beside me, pressing a tissue into my hand. “That boy,” she says quietly. “He might be alright after all.”
“Yeah.” I wipe my eyes. “He might be.”
Santino looks at me over our children’s heads.
“Thank you,” he mouths.
I shake my head.
Thank you, I mouth back.
And the party goes on around us, but for a long moment, there’s nothing in the world but this: a man holding his children for the first time as their father, finally, truly, completely home.
***
There’s one guest I invited myself.
I almost didn’t. My thumb hovered over the message for three days before I sent it, because inviting Massimo Bianchi to anything felt like inviting a cold front.
But he’d wired the twins’ birthday money weeks ago through an assistant with no note, and that silent, awkward reaching had gotten under my skin.
So I texted him the date. He replied within the hour: I will be there.
Nothing else. Massimo doesn’t do exclamation points.
He arrives an hour into the party, stiff as a fence post in a charcoal suit that’s catastrophically wrong for an orchard, carrying two gifts so enormous he has to turn sideways to get through the gate.
One is nearly as tall as he is. I have no idea what’s in them and I suspect he doesn’t either, he probably told an assistant “the biggest ones” and left it at that.
He stands at the edge of the party like a man awaiting sentencing. Doesn’t mingle. Doesn’t touch the pie. Just holds his monstrous gifts and watches the chaos with the expression of a man who has never once in his life known what to do at a party thrown by people who like each other.
And then Leo spots him.
Leo, who has no concept of stranger danger, who would befriend a hurricane if it smiled right, toddles straight up to this terrifying silver-haired billionaire, plants both hands on his knee, and demands: “Up.”
Massimo goes rigid.
“Up,” Leo repeats, with the serene authority of a two-year-old who has never been refused anything.
For one long moment I think Massimo might just… short-circuit. Then, slowly, like a man handling live ordnance, he sets down his enormous gifts, bends, and lifts my son into his arms.
Leo immediately grabs his silk tie and shoves it in his mouth.
And Junie, who took two long months to trust her own father, watches this from across the yard, apparently decides that if grandpa is furniture worth climbing then she wants in, and marches over to tug at his trouser leg until he crouches and gathers her up too.
So there he is. Massimo Bianchi, the coldest man in Italian business, standing in an apple orchard in a ruined suit with a chewed tie and two toddlers using him as a jungle gym.
And his face does the thing.
The shining thing, the one I only ever saw once, over a photo in a diner. One shaking breath of it, quickly mastered but not quickly enough, because I’m watching and so is Santino, whose own eyes have gone suspiciously bright.
“They like him,” Santino says beside me, wondering.
“They like everyone,” I say. “But yeah.”
Massimo catches me looking. For a second the mask threatens to come back down. Then Leo blows a raspberry directly into his cheek, and the old man’s face just, gives.
“Grazie,” he says to me, over the twins’ heads. Just that. Thank you.
I nod. It’s enough.