29. Santino #2
“But I watched him learn. He stayed. He earned his place here, one fence post at a time.” Hattie’s voice softens, just slightly. “So I figure if he’s willing to work that hard for the rest of his life, he might be worth keeping.”
She fixes me with a look. “Vows. You first, vineyard boy.”
I take a breath.
“Mel.” My voice comes out rougher than I intended. “I had a speech. Practiced it in the mirror. Very dignified, very romantic.”
“Of course you did.”
“But standing here, looking at you-” I shake my head. “I can’t remember any of it. So I’m going to tell you the truth instead.”
Her green eyes are shining.
“I failed you,” I say quietly. “The first time. I was so absent that my mother’s lies about me were believable, and I never noticed you were drowning.
I let you walk away pregnant and alone, and I will never forgive myself for that.
I can’t give you back those years. I can’t undo the nights you were scared, or sick, or exhausted, and I wasn’t there. ”
My throat tightens, but I push through.
“But I can give you every single day from now on. Not grand gestures - I know you hate those.” She laughs wetly.
“Just the ordinary stuff. Coffee before you’re awake.
Fence repairs. Bad jokes at breakfast. Braiding Junie’s hair wrong six times before I get it right.
Letting Leo convince me to do inadvisable things. ”
“That’s brave of you.”
“I can give you a man who knows exactly what he almost lost,” I continue, “and will spend the rest of his life making sure you never doubt that you’re chosen. Every day. In the small ways. The boring ways.”
I bring her hand to my lips.
“I carried your ring for two years because I never stopped believing I’d get the chance to put it back on your finger. And now that it’s there-” I glance at the delicate band, the same one she left on my pillow the night she fled Tuscany. “I’m never letting go again. Ti amerò per sempre.”
Mel’s crying now, but she’s also laughing. “You’re making me ruin my mascara, you ridiculous man.”
“Your turn.”
She wipes her eyes, takes a breath, and looks at me with so much love I feel it like a physical weight.
“Santino.” She says my name like it carries weight. Like it’s not just a word but a whole world. “I spent two years convinced I was better off alone. That trusting someone was too dangerous. That I could build a life so self-sufficient that I’d never need anyone again.”
She shakes her head.
“Then you showed up in my orchard, looking like a billboard model who’d gotten very lost, and you just - stayed. You didn’t ask for forgiveness. You just started doing. Fixing things. Helping. Being patient when I was mean and present when I pushed you away.”
Her voice cracks.
“You let Junie take her time. You never rushed her, never forced it, just - waited. And when she finally called you Papà, you cried like a baby.”
“I had allergies.”
“You were sobbing.”
“Seasonal allergies.”
The crowd is laughing. Even Massimo looks amused.
“I thought I knew what I was signing up for when I married you the first time,” Mel continues.
“Non avevo idea.” The Italian flows easily.
I wasn’t expecting it. “I was a kid who thought love meant big feelings and dramatic declarations. But this-” She gestures around us.
At the orchard, the string lights, the ridiculous animals, the family we’ve built.
“This is better. This is real. Questo è per sempre.”
This is forever.
“So yes,” she says. “I choose you. Today. Tomorrow. Every ordinary, boring, beautiful day after that.”
I’m definitely not crying. That’s absolutely just the sunset in my eyes.
Hattie clears her throat. “Rings.”
Everyone turns to Gerald.
Gerald, who has been suspiciously well-behaved this entire ceremony, lifts his head. The satin pillow is still strapped to his back. The rings are still there.
I approach carefully.
Gerald watches me.
I reach for the pillow.
Gerald takes one deliberate step backward.
“Don’t you dare,” I mutter.
The goat’s eyes glitter with unholy joy.
I lunge. Gerald bolts. The orchard erupts into chaos as I chase a bow-tied goat through rows of apple trees while every guest cheers and screams and someone, definitely Chiara, shouts “GET HIM, FRATELLO!”
Finally, I corner Gerald near the dessert table. He looks at me. I look at him.
“I’ll give you the entire centerpiece,” I say.
Gerald considers this.
He steps forward and allows me to remove the rings with what can only be described as regal disdain.
When I return to the altar, breathless and slightly disheveled, Mel is laughing so hard she’s doubled over.
“Worth it,” I say, and slip the ring onto her finger.
“By the power vested in me by the internet and the state of Texas,” Hattie announces, “I now pronounce you married. Again. This time for real. Kiss her before anything else goes wrong.”
I do.
***
It’s late, the last dance danced, the last toast toasted, Chiara’s speech (which included both happy tears and a PowerPoint titled “Why My Brother Is Actually Not Terrible”) survived, and the reception has softened into that golden, winding-down hour when the twins have been carried off asleep across two chairs and the string lights are doing all the work.
We’re out on the quiet porch, just the two of us and the crickets, when I finally let myself breathe.
“You found me,” Mel murmurs against my chest.
“You let yourself be found.”
And then she goes very still. Very pale. Lurches off my lap, staggers to the edge of the porch, and throws up directly into Hattie’s rosebushes.
I’m on my feet instantly. “Mel-”
She straightens slowly, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and turns to look at me. I look at her. And across three feet of Texas night, in our wedding clothes, we arrive at the exact same conclusion at the exact same moment, with the exact same expression of dawning, identical panic.
“No,” she says.
“When did you-”
“I don’t - it can’t-” She presses a hand to her stomach. “Santino.”
I have never moved so fast in my life.
I don’t remember deciding to run. I just know that one moment I’m on the porch and the next I’m sprinting down the dark road toward town in a three-piece wedding suit, jacket flapping, because the pharmacy on Main has a night window and I’m going to be at it.
I bang on the glass until a very startled teenager slides it open, I buy every pregnancy test they stock, and I run the whole way back with a paper bag clutched to my chest like it contains the nuclear codes.
By the time I get back, wheezing, Mel is sitting on the edge of the tub in her wedding dress.
So we do it there, the two of us crammed into the little farmhouse bathroom in our formalwear, the test balanced on the edge of the sink, both of us staring at it like it’s a live grenade that might go off at any second.
“This is insane,” Mel whispers. “We just got married. Tonight. Six hours ago.”
“I know.”
“The twins are four. FOUR. I was going to sleep in tomorrow. For the first time in four years, I was going to sleep in.”
“I know.”
The test changes.
Two lines.
The sound that comes out of me isn’t dignified.
It isn’t the sound a former CEO makes. It’s a full, undignified shriek, and then I’m jumping, actually jumping, wedding jacket flying, in a bathroom the size of a closet, while Mel sits on the edge of the tub with her hands over her face, laughing and panicking in what appear to be equal measures.
“We JUST got married,” she says through her fingers.
“I know!”
“The twins are FOUR!”
“I KNOW!”
And then I stop bouncing, and I drop to my knees on the bathmat in front of her, and I take her face in both hands.
Because the first time, I missed everything. The pregnancy, the birth, the first two years. I missed her sick and scared and alone in a country that wasn’t hers. I missed Leo’s first smile and Junie’s first word and every single moment that made them who they are.
“Hey,” I say. “Look at me. This is the do-over. This is the one the universe owed us.”
Her breath hitches.
“Every appointment,” I tell her. “Every craving at three in the morning. Every terrible, glorious, exhausting second. I’m going to be there for all of it. I’m going to be so annoying you’ll want to divorce me - prenatal vitamins researched in spreadsheets, birth classes, every book ever written-”
“God help us all.”
“-and I’m not going to miss one single thing. Not this time. I promise you.”
She stops panicking somewhere around “every.”
And then she’s crying, the good kind, sliding off the edge of the tub and into my lap, burying her face in my collar, and I wrap both arms around her and hold on.
The two of us on the bathroom floor in our wedding clothes, her dress pooling everywhere, my jacket ruined, giggling like the teenagers we never got to be together.
“I love you,” she says into my neck.
“I love you back. All of you. However many of you there turn out to be.”
She laughs so hard she snorts, and it’s the best sound I’ve ever heard.