17. Ysabelle
— ? —
Ysabelle
The drive home from the anniversary celebration is quiet, the charged stillness of two people processing too much at once, trying to find the right place to begin.
Pietro keeps one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on the center console between us. I reach over and lace my fingers through his. He glances at me, just briefly, and squeezes.
***
The house is dark when we arrive. We move through the familiar spaces without turning on lights, until we reach the living room. Pietro pours us both water, then settles into the corner of the couch. I curl into the opposite corner, facing him, my legs tucked beneath me.
“I have a confession,” I say, before either of us can start on the speech.
Pietro’s eyes lift to mine, and I catch the careful blankness that means he’s bracing for impact.
I stand, walk to the antique secretary desk in the corner, and retrieve the folder I brought back from Remedios’s guest room and hid in the bottom drawer months ago.
The paper is slightly wrinkled from the times I’ve pulled it out, read it, put it back.
I return to the couch and hold the folder between us.
“What is this?”
“Divorce papers. I had them drawn up in November. After the gala, after everything. I was going to file them. I drove to the courthouse three separate times.”
His face has gone pale. “But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t. Every time I tried, I’d think about the early years. About the test kitchen. About how you looked at me the first time we created a new recipe together, stunned, almost proud. I couldn’t file them because I kept hoping that version of you was still in there, somewhere.”
Pietro reaches for the folder, and I let him take it. He opens it, skimming the pages, and then he laughs, a short, humorless sound.
“What?” My voice comes out thin.
He turns the folder so I can see it, one finger resting on the blank line at the foot of the page. “There’s a place for my signature. Page twelve.”
“I know.”
He looks up at me, and the humorless laugh is gone, and what’s left in its place is so much worse. “I never signed my copy either.”
I stare at him. “What?”
“After you left for Remedios’s. After that night.
I talked to a lawyer too. I had my own set drawn up.
And I couldn’t sign them. I kept them in my office safe, thinking eventually I’d have the courage, and every time I tried, I’d think about that night in the test kitchen when you explained your grandmother’s recipes to me, about how your eyes lit up when you talked about flavor memories, and I couldn’t do it. ”
He’s gone before I can answer, down the hall to the office, and I hear the safe’s dial and the heavy little door. He comes back with a folder the twin of mine, and he doesn’t notice, because he’s looking at me, that a second set of papers is clipped inside the cover.
I do. Thick, blue-bound, a signature page at the back with a line as empty as the one on page twelve. The date at the top is the day we heard the heartbeat.
“Pietro.” I turn it so he can see what I’m holding. “Tell me what this is.”
He goes very still. “Nothing that matters now.”
“It’s a contract for more money than my father’s family has made in three generations, dated the afternoon you sat in a clinic holding my hand. It was never signed.” I look up. “You told me you’d left a meeting.”
“I did leave a meeting.” He rubs a hand down his face. “That was the meeting.”
“And the deal?”
“Didn’t survive the week. I covered the cost myself, so it wouldn’t fall on anyone else.” He says it flat, the way he’d read a line item. “It was the day we heard the heartbeat, Ysabelle. There wasn’t a version of that afternoon where I stayed in the room.”
“I thought you were being dutiful,” I whisper. “I thought you came because it was expected.”
“I came because if I’d missed it, no amount of money would have made that okay.”
I should be grateful, and I am, so much that it hurts.
But under it sits the old sting of his silence, the way he’ll carry a thing alone rather than hand me half of it.
“You should have told me. Not for credit. Because I’m your wife, and I spent months thinking you were choosing the company over everything, and all that time you were paying for me in secret. ”
“I didn’t want it to be leverage,” he says. “I didn’t want you to feel like you owed me.”
“I don’t owe you.” I set the contract down on top of the divorce papers, his and mine. “But I’d have liked to know.”
He nods slowly, and doesn’t defend himself.
We sit with this revelation, the symmetry of our cowardice sitting between us. Both of us with divorce papers we couldn’t file, too afraid to leave, too afraid to stay fully.
“Why didn’t you sign?” I ask.
“Because losing you would have been worse than any unhappiness I thought I was feeling. Because I married you for the arrangement, at first, but I stayed because I fell in love with you so gradually that I didn’t even notice until you weren’t there anymore.” He pauses. “Why didn’t you file?”
The question I’ve been avoiding, even in my own mind.
“Because I was afraid that if I left, I’d prove what I always suspected,” I say, and the words come out cracked, vulnerable. “That you only married me for the merger. That it had all just been business for you. And as long as I stayed, I could pretend that wasn’t true.”
“Ysabelle.” His voice is raw. “Our fathers arranged it, yes. But I stopped thinking of you as an arrangement a long time ago. I couldn’t have left you if I tried.
I was terrified, every single day, that you only stayed because of the arrangement.
That if there hadn’t been contracts and business obligations, you’d have left years ago. ”
The laughter that escapes me is half sob. “We’re idiots.”
He pulls me in. “The worst kind.”
“Ten years of being terrified of the same thing and neither of us ever said it.”
“I didn’t know how. I thought if I admitted I needed you, you’d see it as weakness. Or worse, obligation.”
I lean forward, take the folder from his hands. “I think we should destroy these.”
He meets my eyes, and what I see there makes my breath catch. Hope, raw and unguarded, without the shields he usually keeps in place.
“Together?”
I nod.
We stand. We walk to the fireplace that we’ve never actually used, and Pietro starts a fire with the same focused attention he brings to everything. When the flames are steady, I tear the first page of my divorce papers and hand it to him. He adds it to the fire.
“For never telling you what walking away cost me,” he says.
I tear another page, hand it over.
“For never admitting I was afraid you didn’t love me,” I say.
We continue like this, trading confessions with each piece of paper. For the late nights, for the silences that grew until they filled every room.
Pietro adds his own pages, and they’re identical to mine, an exact mirror of failed courage.
“For convincing myself that distance was the same as strength,” he says, feeding another page to the flames.
“For letting myself believe I was secondary in your life instead of demanding to be seen.”
The fire consumes our would-be endings, and I watch the pages curl and blacken and turn to ash. When the last of them is gone, Pietro reaches for me, and I let myself be pulled into his arms.
“No more secrets,” he murmurs against my hair.
“Or silences,” I say against his shirt.
“We talk about things, even when it’s terrifying.”
“Especially when it’s terrifying.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me, his hands cradling my face with extraordinary gentleness.
“I love you,” he says. “The arrangement and the company have nothing to do with it. I love you because you challenge me, because you see through every wall I try to build, because you make me want to be someone worth being.”
I turn my head, press my lips to his palm.
He said these words to me before, weeks ago, buried inside me in the dark, and I lay there and let them land and couldn’t give them back. I can give them back now.
“I love you because you kept that napkin,” I say. “Because you memorized Nonna Fe’s stories. Because underneath all the corporate polish, you’re still the boy who wanted to prove he was more than his name. I love who you are when you stop performing.”
He kisses me, and it’s different from before, from the desperate collision of our first reunion. This is slow and deliberate, a choice to begin again. His hands move from my face to my shoulders and down my arms, slow and certain, as though he means to learn me all over again.
I pull back, take his hand, and lead him toward the bedroom.
The bedroom is dark and still, the house quiet around us. I turn to face him, and I see the question in his eyes, the need for confirmation that this is what I want.
“Yes,” I say, answering what he hasn’t asked.
He steps closer and finds the zipper at the back of my dress, drawing it down slow, his knuckles trailing the length of my spine. The fabric pools at my feet, and he just looks, quiet, for the length of several breaths.
“Beautiful,” he says, rough, and doesn’t look away.
I reach for his shirt, working the buttons with hands that aren’t quite steady. He lets me undress him, and when we’re both bare he backs me toward the bed, careful with me even now, though his eyes are anything but.
“You’re allowed to touch me like I won’t break,” I murmur.
“I know,” he says, and lays me down and settles beside me, his hand spreading warm over the curve of my stomach. “I’m going to take my time anyway.”
He bends and presses his mouth to the swell where our child is growing, and the tenderness of it lodges under my sternum.
“I love you both,” he says against my skin. “Every day. I’m going to prove it.”
Then his mouth starts a slow path up my body, and I let him have it for as long as my patience lasts, which isn’t long. I flatten a hand on his chest and push him onto his back.
“My turn,” I tell him, and swing a leg over his hips.
His hands come to my thighs, and I feel the effort it takes him to hold still. “Easy,” he says.
“I’ve got it. This way I set the pace, and you get to lie there and behave.” I reach between us and close my hand around his cock, and whatever he meant to say about behaving dies in his throat.
He’s hard and hot in my grip. I stroke him once, slow, and watch his jaw go tight.
“You’re enjoying this,” he manages.
“Enormously.” I lift up, line him against me, and sink down in one slow slide until he fills me completely and I have to stop and breathe around it.
We both make a sound at that, low and helpless. His hands flex on my hips, holding himself back by force.
“Ysabelle.” My name comes out of him half plea, half curse.
“That’s the idea.” I brace my palms on his chest and start to move.
I ride him slow at first, hunting the angle that makes my breath catch, then faster, chasing it. He lets me run the whole show, thumbs digging into my hips, watching me take my pleasure with his jaw slack and his eyes gone dark.
Whatever was reverent in him earlier is gone. What’s left is greedy.
“Enjoying the view?” I get out, barely.
“Best view of my life.” He snaps his hips up on the next stroke, and my rhythm shatters on a gasp.
“I thought you were behaving.”
“I lied.” His hand slides off my hip, down, his thumb finding my clit and circling in time with the way I grind against him. “Now stop talking and come for me.”
I stop talking. I brace on his chest and take him deeper, riding him hard, the heat winding tight and tighter with every roll of my hips while his thumb keeps its merciless rhythm.
“Pietro-” It’s all the warning I have.
“I’ve got you. Let go.”
I come apart around him, clenching so hard it punches a raw sound out of me, and I’d be mortified by how loud it is if I had one thought left to spare. He works me through it, hips still moving under mine, until I’m shaking and boneless on top of him.
Then he sits up with me in his lap, both arms banding around my back, and takes over, rolling up into me slow and deep while I’m still fluttering around him.
His face is pressed into my throat, his breath in pieces. “I love you,” he says into my skin, again and again, the only word he has left, and this time it’s a vow.
I hold his head to me and give it back, the two of us moving together now, no space left between the words and the bodies making them.
The second peak builds lower and deeper than the first, rolling up from beneath my ribs.
“I’m close,” I tell him against his hair. “Come with me. I want to feel you let go.”
“Together,” he says.
I nod against his jaw, past words.
He thrusts up into me, once, twice, the careful rhythm finally coming apart, and then I feel him go, feel him pulse deep inside me as he groans my name into my mouth, and it drags me over with him.
We come undone together, clinging, laughing a little at the end because it’s too much and exactly enough at once.
In the aftermath, we lie tangled together, my head on his chest, his hand stroking lazily through my hair. I can hear his heartbeat, steady and strong, and beneath my own heart, I imagine I can feel our baby’s too.
“So,” Pietro says eventually. “About those vows you’re going to write.”
I smile against his skin. “What about them?”
“Should I be worried?”
“Terrified.”