11. Ysabelle
— ? —
Ysabelle
The prenatal clinic smells of antiseptic and nerves.
I’m sitting in the waiting room with my hands folded in my lap, trying not to look as nervous as I feel. The other women here are in various stages of pregnancy, some barely showing, others looking ready to pop. Most of them have partners with them: husbands, boyfriends, support systems.
Pietro is beside me, rigid and alert.
He insisted on coming. “It’s a routine scan,” I told him last night, in the flat voice I’ve perfected this year.
“Don’t rearrange your life.” He didn’t argue, which I should have recognized as a warning, and he’d left for the office before I was up.
But he’s here, in pressed slacks and a button-down shirt, dressed for a board meeting.
My phone buzzes in my lap. Trina: Don’t look. Please.
So of course I look. The tabloid site loads before I can stop my thumb, and there’s my face, in Pietro’s oversized sweater, bent double behind a stack of rice sacks in a wet market, his hand at the back of my neck.
MARINO’S WIFE HIDING PREGNANCY FROM ESTRANGED HUSBAND?
Sources close to the Greyson camp say the marriage collapsed weeks ago.
I turn the screen face-down on my thigh. My hand has gone to my stomach on its own, and every woman in this waiting room could tell you why, because they’ve all read it. Giulietta is out of the company and out of his life and she still got to tell the world before I did.
“You saw it,” Pietro says, very low. He doesn’t make it a question. “I’ve had legal on it since six this morning. It’ll be gone by tonight.”
“It’s already been read.” I don’t look at him. “You can’t un-tell people a thing like that.”
“Mrs. Marino?”
The nurse at the desk is looking at us. At me. At Pietro. Her eyes flick between us with an expression I recognize: confusion, then judgment.
I stand. Pietro stands with me.
“Just the patient for now,” the nurse says, her smile professional and exclusionary.
Pietro steps forward. “I’m her husband.”
“We usually have the partner wait until-”
“I’m her husband.” His voice is quiet but carries. The waiting room goes still. “My wife is the other half of everything I have, and she’s carrying our first child. I’ll be joining her.”
The nurse’s expression wavers. She looks at me for confirmation.
I nod.
We follow her down a hallway lined with posters about fetal development and breastfeeding benefits. I can feel Pietro’s hand hovering near my lower back, not quite touching. He’s been doing that lately, offering contact without taking it, letting me decide when and how to close the distance.
The examination room is small and cold. I change into a paper gown while Pietro stares determinedly at the wall. The doctor enters, a woman in her fifties with kind eyes and efficient hands, and begins the routine checks. Blood pressure, weight, a urine sample.
Then the ultrasound.
I lie back on the table. The doctor squirts gel on my stomach, cold, always cold, and presses the wand against my skin.
Pietro is beside me. His hand rests on the edge of the table, inches from mine.
“There we are,” the doctor says. “You see that? That’s the spine. And here-” She moves the wand. “There’s the head. Everything’s measuring right on track.”
The screen shows a grainy black-and-white image, blurry shapes that don’t quite look human yet but are unmistakably alive.
Then she turns on the sound.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
Fast and steady, the rapid, rushing flutter of our baby’s heartbeat.
Pietro makes a sound beside me. I turn my head and see his face, his actual face, not the mask he wears in boardrooms. His eyes are wet. His jaw is trembling. He’s looking at the screen the way I’ve never seen him look at anything.
My hand finds his before I decide to reach.
His fingers close around mine, gentle and tight.
We listen to our baby’s heartbeat together.
***
When we get back to Remedios’s house, there’s a car at the curb that I’d know anywhere, black and polished and driven by a man who’s worked for my parents since I was six.
My mother is on the front step. She hasn’t gone in. She’s standing outside a house she despises in her good pearls, and in both hands she’s holding a pot with a dish towel folded over the lid.
“Ma?”
“Don’t.” She holds the pot out before I’ve reached her. “Take it before it goes cold. I’m not coming inside.”
I take it, because there’s nothing else to do with my hands. Even through the towel I know what it is. Tiramisu. My grandmother made it for me when I was sick. My mother made it after heartbreaks, twice in my life, and never once said the word.
“How did you-” I turn to Pietro.
He’s stopped at the gate, giving us the step. “I called her,” he says. “This morning, before the office. I asked for the recipe.”
My mother’s mouth thins. “He asked for my recipe,” she says to the street, not to either of us, “and then he told me why. I decided I’d rather make it myself than hear him make it wrong.”
I stare at her. Beatrice Sposito is steel and strategy, calculation and control. The idea of her at her own stove at seven in the morning, stirring cocoa for a daughter she’s never once held when it counted, undoes me a little.
“Did you keep it bittersweet?” I ask.
“Three to one.” A pause. “You never liked it any other way.”
She looks at me then, at the hand on my stomach and the tabloid she has certainly read, and I watch her decide not to say a single thing about any of it. Then she turns and goes back down the path to her car, and the driver has the door open before she reaches it, and she doesn’t look back.
Inside, I ladle it into a bowl with hands that aren’t steady, and I take a bite.
It’s perfect. Rich and thick and just bitter enough, exactly the way Nonna used to make it.
I cry.
Nothing dramatic about it, just quiet tears sliding down my cheeks while I eat, while Pietro stands beside me and doesn’t say anything or try to fix it, only hands me a napkin and waits.
When I finish, he takes the bowl, washes it, dries it, and puts it away.
“You can stay,” I say.
He pauses, his back to me.
“In the other room,” I clarify. “Instead of the couch. Remedios has a spare one. It’s small, but-”
“Yes.” He turns. His eyes are still red from the clinic. “Yes. I’ll stay.”
***
The storm makes landfall a little after ten. They’ve had the red weather warning up since noon, the whole coast under it, the kind of alert that closes the bridges and empties the streets.
We’ve listened to it build all evening, the wind first, testing the shutters, then the rain coming sideways in sheets until the street outside is a black river.
Zia Remedios calls at nine to say she’s stranded at her cousin’s across town, the roads already flooded past the tires, and that we’re to lock up and not wait on her.
“So it’s just us,” Pietro says, setting down the phone. He says it carefully, the way he says everything now, as if the wrong weight on a word might break the quiet.
“For the whole night, then.”
The power dies at half past ten.
The house drops into a darkness so complete I feel it on my skin. Then the small sounds: Pietro moving, sure-footed, finding the drawer where Remedios keeps the candles, the scratch of a match. Light blooms between us, gold and unsteady, and throws his face into a landscape I don’t recognize.
Because the storm is getting into him.
It’s subtle at first, a tightness at the jaw, the way his eyes cut to the window with each crack of thunder. His hand flattens on the table and presses down, holding himself in place.
“Pietro.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.” I’ve spent ten years reading this man across boardroom tables and benefit dinners, and I’ve never once seen him afraid. “Sit down. Talk to me, or don’t, but sit.”
He sits. The thunder comes again, closer, and he flinches, Pietro Marino, who stares down a room full of men twice his age without blinking, flinches, reduced to a boy in a storm, and the frozen thing in my chest cracks clean through.
“I was nine,” he says. He isn’t looking at me.
He’s looking at the candle. “The year a bad storm took the roof off our house upstate. My parents were in the city, there was always somewhere else they needed to be, and it was just me and the nanny, and she ran. When the water came in, she ran. I climbed into the bathtub and pulled the shower curtain over me and stayed there all night, waiting for someone to come find me.” A breath.
“No one came. The storm passed and I was still in that tub in the morning.”
The candle gutters. I don’t dare breathe.
“That’s what all of it was,” he says. “The company. The hours. Giulietta’s crises, always so urgent, always needing me.
I ran to them because being needed felt like being found.
And the whole time, the one person who actually saw me was the one I kept leaving to wait in the dark.
” He finally looks up. His eyes are wet in the candlelight.
“I did to you exactly what they did to me. I didn’t come when it mattered. ”
I reach across the table before I’ve decided to. My hand finds his, and his fingers close around mine so fast it’s almost desperate.
“I was seven,” I say. “A storm took our roof too. I spent six hours under the kitchen table, certain the sky was going to swallow me, and I’ve been afraid of storms ever since.” My throat is tight. “We have the same scar, Pietro. The same weather. And we spent ten years too proud to say so.”
His face breaks open.
He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles and holds it there, and the space between us goes thin and hot.
His thumb drags over my pulse, slow, and I feel it everywhere, a hot pull low in my belly, an ache I press my thighs together against.
It would take nothing. One inch, and I could be in his lap in the candlelight, letting him have me right here on Zia Remedios’s floor, and God help me, I want to.
His eyes ask the question. My whole body leans toward yes-
And then my stomach clenches, a hard low twist that could be nerves or a warning, and my breath snags on it.
I pull my hand back before I can do the thing I’m not ready to mean.
“I should sleep,” I whisper.
“Ysabelle-”
“Goodnight, Pietro.”
I take a candle and leave him alone at the table with the storm.
But I don’t sleep. I lie in the dark with my hand pressed flat between my legs as if that would quiet anything, listening to the rain and to him moving around out there.
I replay the heat of his mouth on my knuckles until I’m wound too tight to breathe. I want to walk back out and climb into his lap and stop pretending my body hasn’t already forgiven what my head hasn’t.
I hate that I want it. I want it anyway.
That night, I leave my door open a crack.
I don’t know why. At first light I give up on sleep and do the thing he’s been doing for me, and fill a glass of water for the man asleep on the other side of that door.
He doesn’t stir when I set it down. The house is still dark and the air is used up, so I unlatch the front door for the first clean breath of the morning.
There’s an envelope on the step.
Cream stock, no stamp, my name across the front in a handwriting I’ve seen on a year of notes left on my husband’s desk. Somebody stood on this step in the dark while we slept through the storm. I turn it over. The flap isn’t sealed, and the first line is already showing.
He will never really be yours.