10. Pietro
— ? —
Pietro
The house is quiet at four in the morning.
I don’t really sleep anymore. I doze on the couch with one ear turned toward her door, and a little after four, when I hear her stir the way she does before she wakes thirsty, I’m already on my feet with a glass of water in my hand.
She mentioned it once, months ago, in passing. We were lying in our bed at home, her voice already half dissolved into sleep.
“I always wake up thirsty at dawn,” she said. “Have since I was a little girl. Nonna used to say I did my growing at night.”
I filed it away and forgot it. I forgot so many things she told me.
Now I’m trying to remember them all.
I ease her door open. The hinges don’t squeak, I oiled them two days ago, another tutorial on my phone, another small act of penance.
The room is dark except for the streetlight filtering through the curtains, and I can see her shape in the bed.
She’s on her side, one arm curled around a pillow, her hair spread across the sheets.
I set the glass on the nightstand. Beside it, I leave her prenatal vitamins and a note I wrote at two in the morning when I couldn’t sleep: Take the iron with food to avoid nausea. The folic acid is fine on empty stomach. I read it helps with neural development.
She stirs.
I freeze.
But she doesn’t wake. She just sighs and pulls the pillow closer, and I back out of the room with nothing stolen but a glimpse of my own wife.
The pregnancy book lives under my pillow now.
I bought it the day after the market, at the Strand where the clerk clearly thought I’d wandered in by mistake.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting, already dog-eared, the margins filling up with my handwriting.
I read it the way I once read a balance sheet, hunting for the thing I’d missed, except every line is about her body and the life it’s making and there is no version of this I can delegate.
This morning I’m in the kitchen at six, boiling water for her ginger tea.
I know how she takes it: steeped strong until the water turns gold, a spoonful of honey stirred in slowly, a squeeze of lemon at the end.
She never told me this directly. I learned it by watching her in those early months of our marriage, before I got distracted by Giulietta’s calls and Zia Consuelo’s ghost.
Remedios appears in the doorway. She’s fully dressed despite the hour, because Remedios is always fully dressed, always ready.
“You’re still here,” she says.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Hmm.” She makes that sound again, the one that means she’s reserving judgment. “The couch treating you well?”
“My back will never forgive me.”
“Good.”
She pours herself coffee and leaves me to it.
When the tea is ready, I carry it to Ysabelle’s room. She’s awake now, sitting up against the headboard with the water glass in her hand, empty, I notice, and my chest tightens with irrational pride.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she says.
“You were asleep.”
“You’ve been doing this every night.”
It’s not a question.
“Yes.”
She looks at the tea, then the vitamins, then the note, which she’s already read, I can tell by the way the paper is unfolded.
“Neural development,” she says.
“The book says folic acid is critical in the first trimester.”
“You bought a book.”
“More than one,” I admit. I set the tea on the nightstand. “The honey is local. I read that processed honey can sometimes contain-”
“Pietro.”
I stop.
She’s looking at me with an expression I can’t place, warmer than anger and softer than forgiveness.
“Sit down,” she says.
I sit on the edge of the bed, far enough to give her space, close enough to smell the sleep-warmth on her skin.
This close, I can see the pulse ticking at the side of her neck, the damp hair stuck to her temple, the loose collar of her nightgown gone crooked.
Sitting this close undoes the control I’ve spent weeks pretending to have.
I flatten one hand on the mattress and keep my eyes on the steam curling off the tea until the urge to close the distance passes.
I don’t reach for her. I lost that right, and knowing it aches, a handspan from my wife with my hands ordered to behave.
She picks up the tea. Takes a sip. Her eyebrows rise slightly.
She lowers the cup, and for a second the wariness slips. “You remembered the lemon.”
“You like it tart,” I say. It’s the smallest thing to have remembered, and saying it feels enormous, the most important sentence I’ve managed in a year.
“I never told you that.”
“You didn’t have to.” I want to tell her the rest, that I spent a decade not noticing and I’m trying to make up for every cup I got wrong, but I hold it back and hold her eyes instead.
She takes another sip. Then another. I watch her drink my offering, and it’s the most I’ve been given in months.
“The pillows,” she says. “You rearranged them.”
“Side-sleeping. It’s better for circulation later in the pregnancy.” I hesitate. “I can change them back if you prefer-”
“No.” She settles against them, and I see the relief in her shoulders. “They’re actually comfortable now.”
We sit in silence. The morning light is strengthening, turning the room from gray to gold. I can hear birds outside, and the distant rumble of traffic, and my own heartbeat loud in my ears.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks.
“Because I love you.”
“You loved me before. It wasn’t enough.”
“I know.” I look at my hands. The burn from the bread-baking has healed into a pink stripe across my palm. “I wasn’t paying attention before. I thought love was a feeling, not a choice. I thought it would sustain itself.”
“And now?”
“Now I know better.” I meet her eyes. “Love is waking up at four to bring you water. Love is reading books about pregnancy until my eyes blur. Love is staying on that couch even when my back screams at me, because you asked me to, and you’re more important than my comfort.”
Her hand drifts to the curve of her belly, that same unconscious guard. I want to put my hand there too, to feel the life we made together.
But I haven’t earned that yet.
“You’ve been kind for a week,” she says. “You were kind in the early years too, before the company ate you.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how long this version of you lasts.”
“I know that too,” I say, and I mean it as a promise, not a surrender.
“But-” She pauses. Looks at the tea in her hands. “The tea is perfect.”
It isn’t forgiveness, not even close.
But when she reaches for the vitamin bottle and her fingers brush mine, she doesn’t pull away.
And when she looks up at me, there’s a light in her eyes that might be the beginning of softness.
An almost-smile, there and gone. Then she holds my eyes a beat longer than she needs to, making sure I understand this isn’t nothing, that she knows exactly what she’s handing me and exactly how easily she could take it back.
“Don’t be late with it tomorrow,” she says, so quiet I almost miss it, and it isn’t a request, and it isn’t a thank-you.
It’s a door left open a single inch, with her hand still on it.
Forgiveness it isn’t. But I’d crawl the length of this house on my knees to keep that inch of door from closing, and we both know it.