2. Pietro
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Pietro
The photo on my desk is wrong.
I notice it the way you notice a crooked picture frame, with that low-level irritation that scratches at the back of your mind without demanding immediate attention.
It’s our wedding photo, the one from the reception where Ysabelle is laughing at a joke I made, her head thrown back, her hand on my chest. Except someone has moved it.
Adjusted it. The frame is tilted now, and part of the image is hidden behind my desk lamp.
The part with Ysabelle’s face.
I straighten it absently and turn back to my laptop, where seventeen unread emails are demanding various forms of my attention.
The deadlines. The numbers. The people who all want a piece of me by three.
My calendar is a war zone of overlapping obligations, and somewhere in the crossfire is my wife, making focaccia in our kitchen, believing I remembered our anniversary.
I didn’t remember. Not until she said it, and then the guilt hit, sudden and hard enough to empty my lungs.
Ten years. We’ve been married for ten years, and I can’t even keep the date in my head.
My phone buzzes. Giulietta’s name on the screen.
Running late, traffic on the FDR. Start without me?
I type back a quick confirmation and try not to think about the disappointment in Ysabelle’s eyes this morning. She’d been holding her apron pocket, clutching at it the way she does when she’s nervous. I should have asked what was inside, and kissed her properly instead of rushing out the door.
I should do a lot of things.
The office is quiet this early, just me and the cleaning crew and the ghosts of all the promises I’ve broken. I pull up my calendar, find the dinner reservation she mentioned. Rosetta, eight o’clock. Our first-date restaurant, back when we were strangers pretending we had a choice in our future.
I cancel it.
The announcement can’t be rescheduled. There are people flying in from overseas, reporters who’ve blocked out their whole afternoon, a day that has to go exactly right. Ysabelle will understand. She always understands.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? She always understands, and I always let her.
I send her a text that says I might be late, then put my phone face-down on the desk so I don’t have to see if she responds.
The photo catches my eye again. Crooked. Definitely crooked. I reach out to straighten it, and my hand freezes.
There’s a smudge on the glass. A fingerprint, right over Ysabelle’s face, like someone touched the photo and didn’t bother to wipe it clean.
The cleaning crew must have knocked it over. That’s all.
I wipe the glass with my sleeve and move on.
Giulietta arrives an hour later, sweeping into my office with her usual crisp efficiency. She’s wearing cream silk, an outfit that photographs well and costs more than most people’s monthly rent. Her smile is precise, professional.
“Sorry I’m late. The traffic was brutal.” She sets a folder on my desk. “I’ve got the updated talking points. Legal signed off this morning.”
“Good. And the rest of it?”
“All in there. We’re projecting a fifteen percent increase in the first quarter alone.”
I flip through the pages, scanning the figures, trying to focus on the deal instead of the dinner I just canceled. Giulietta watches me with that particular attention she’s always had, attention that makes you feel seen and slightly uncomfortable at the same time.
“You seem distracted,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
“Pietro.” She leans forward, her voice dropping. “I know today’s your anniversary.”
I look up. Her eyes are soft with sympathy, and for a moment I let myself feel how badly I’ve failed her.
“I forgot,” I admit. “Until she reminded me this morning.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It sounds exactly like me, actually.” I close the folder. “I’ve been doing this for years. Missing dinners, forgetting dates, letting work swallow everything else. She deserves better.”
Giulietta is quiet for a moment. Then she reaches across the desk and squeezes my hand. Brief, comforting.
“Your mother would be so proud of what you’ve built here. She didn’t die so you could feel guilty about success.”
My mother isn’t dead. But Zia Consuelo is. Giulietta’s mother, my mother’s oldest friend and no blood of mine, the woman who raised me when my own parents were too busy building their empire to notice I existed. The woman who made me promise, on her deathbed, that I’d take care of her daughter.
“You’re like a brother to her, Pietro,” she said, and her hand in mine weighed nothing at all. “She doesn’t have anyone else. Promise me you’ll look out for her.”
“I promise, Zia.” It was the only thing left that she wanted and I could give.
I’ve kept that promise for ten years now, finding her jobs, supporting her career, making sure she had a place in the company she’d grown up watching her mother build.
It’s not romantic. It’s never been romantic.
But it’s complicated in ways I can’t explain to anyone who didn’t grow up in that house, eating Zia Consuelo’s cooking, listening to her stories about the old days when Marino Foods was just a dream.
“I should get back to prep,” Giulietta says, straightening. “We’re on in four hours.”
“Right. I’ll meet you in the conference room.”
She leaves. I check my phone.
One message from Ysabelle. Just a heart emoji, red and simple.
I stare at it for too long. She never sends hearts anymore. She used to, in the early years, scatter them through every text. Then they thinned out, then stopped. Now this single heart reads as a question I don’t know how to answer.
I type and delete six different responses. Finally settle on: I’ll try to make dinner. Promise.
***
The press conference goes perfectly. Giulietta is poised at the podium, her talking points smooth and well-rehearsed. I stand beside her, fielding questions about the announcement, about our plans, about the future we’re building.
A reporter near the front lifts his recorder. “Mr. Marino, the company has always sold itself on tradition. With this expansion, is Marino Foods still a family business?”
I open my mouth, and Giulietta leans into the microphone before I can.
“Absolutely. Family is at the heart of everything we do.” Her hand lands on my arm, warm and brief, timed for the cameras. “This expansion doesn’t change that. It just brings our family’s table to more of the country.”
The photographers capture the moment. The flashes make me blink.
Afterward there are drinks I don’t want and hands to shake and people telling me what a triumph it was.
I smile until my face aches. My phone stays in my pocket the whole time, because I already know there’s nothing on it from her but that one red heart, and I don’t know how to answer a heart from a woman I’ve spent ten years disappointing.
***
It’s nearly midnight before I get to the car. The closer I drive to home, the worse my own actions sit in my chest. I rehearse apologies at every red light. None of them are big enough.
My phone buzzes on the passenger seat. Not Ysabelle. My mother, who I haven’t called in three weeks.
Ma: Did your wife find out about today’s presser from the news? Because I did.
I read it twice at a stoplight, and it doesn’t hurt any less the second time. Even my mother saw her before I did. At some point I forgot how to make Ysabelle laugh, and I became a man whose own mother has to scold him on his wife’s behalf.
The light turns green. I drive home to a house that’s mostly dark, except for a low gold glow in the dining-room window, the candles she must have lit hours ago for a dinner I made certain would never happen. I sit in the driveway a long time, working up the nerve to walk into my own house.