25. Adriana
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Adriana
I wake up slow.
There’s sunlight on my face, warm and insistent, and for a second I don’t know where I am. The bed’s too big. The sheets are too soft. The smell is different from my tiny room with its cheap detergent and fire-escape air.
Then I feel him. The weight of his arm across my waist. The warmth of his chest against my back. The slow, even sound of his breathing.
Enzo.
I’m back.
I lie there for a while, not moving, just letting it sink in. The ceiling I memorized during all those weeks I lived here. The way the light comes through the windows in the morning. The particular quiet of a penthouse, sealed off from the city below.
I missed this. I didn’t let myself admit how much, but I missed it. Not just him, though God, I missed him, but this. The quiet. The peace. The feeling of being exactly where I’m supposed to be.
His arm tightens around me. He’s waking up.
“Morning,” he mumbles against my hair.
“Morning.”
“You’re still here.”
“I told you I would be.”
“I know. Still checking.”
I roll over to face him. He looks soft in the morning light, all the sharp edges blurred by sleep. There’s a pillow crease on his cheek. His hair’s a disaster.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” He traces a finger down my nose. “I like waking up to you.”
“I like being woken up to.”
“That’s not grammatically correct.”
“It’s early. Grammar doesn’t exist yet.”
He laughs, a quiet rumble in his chest, and pulls me closer. I tuck my head under his chin.
“Don’t you have class?” he asks.
“Not today. No class today.” I stretch against him. “I’m all yours.”
“Dangerous thing to tell me.”
“I’ll risk it.”
He gives the top of my head a peck.
“Woman showed up at my door yesterday,” he says. “Very demanding. Kept me up half the night.”
I pinch his side. He doesn’t flinch.
“Rude,” he says.
“You deserved it.”
***
We don’t get out of bed for another hour.
Not for sex, though there’s some of that too, slow and lazy, nothing like the desperate way we came together against the door yesterday. Just lying there. Talking. Being.
He tells me about the past two months. The work, the empty apartment, the way the rooms got too quiet. He doesn’t make it sound pathetic, but I can read between the lines. He was miserable. He waited anyway.
“I drove past your building once,” he admits. “Just once. Sat outside like a stalker, watching your window.”
“That’s creepy.”
“I know.”
“Also a little sweet.”
“It’s not sweet. It’s unhinged.”
“A little sweet.” I kiss his shoulder. “You didn’t come up.”
“I wanted to. Every day, I wanted to.”
“But you stayed away.”
“I stayed away.” He says it like it still costs him. “Figured if I showed up, I’d just be proving I couldn’t let you have the one thing you asked me for.”
That goes through me. Enzo, who spent his whole life going after what he wanted, sitting in a car outside my building and then driving home empty-handed, over and over, because I’d asked him to.
“I know what that cost you,” I say. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t.”
He pulls me on top of him, settling me against his chest. I prop my chin on my hands and look down at his face.
“What now?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what now. What does this look like? I’ve got my room through the end of the semester. I’ve got classes. You’ve got your whole life here. How does this work?”
“However we want it to work.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.” He picks up the end of my hair and swirls it in his fingers. “I’m not going to plan this out, Ana. No timeline, no list, no figuring out every step in advance. I just want to be with you. The rest we work out as we go.”
“That’s very un-Enzo of you.”
“I’m evolving.”
“Are you, though?”
“I’m trying.” He’s serious now, the teasing gone.
“I spent my whole life trying to control everything. Every outcome, every move. And then you left. I couldn’t control that, and it didn’t kill me.
It just hurt. But I lived through it. And I think the things worth having might be the ones you can’t hold that tightly. The ones you have to trust instead.”
“That’s very wise.”
“I’ve had two months to think about it.”
I lean down and kiss him. Soft. Slow.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you too.”
“I’m not moving back in right away. I want to keep the room until the semester ends.”
“Okay.”
“And I won’t be here every night. I’ve got studying and friends and a life I built that I’m not abandoning.”
“Okay.”
“And I need you to be okay with that. Really okay. Not saying okay while you secretly plan to talk me out of it.”
He smiles, just a little. “I’m really okay with it. I told you. Evolving.”
“We’ll see.”
“We will.”
Eventually we get up. We shower, which takes longer than it should. He makes coffee while I steal one of his shirts, and we sit at the kitchen island eating toast like normal people.
It’s so domestic it makes my chest ache.
“This is what I want,” I say, out of nowhere.
He looks up from his coffee. “What?”
“This. Just this. Toast and coffee and slow mornings. Not the drama. Not the revenge. Not the scheming or the family politics or any of it.” I gesture around the kitchen. “Just being normal. Being a little boring.”
“You think this is boring?”
“I think boring is underrated.”
He sets down his mug. Reaches across the island to take my hand.
“I can do boring,” he says. “I can do toast and coffee. I can do slow mornings for the rest of my life, if that’s what you want.”
“It’s all I want.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back.
And for a moment, everything is perfect.
The moment lasts about ten more minutes.
We’re still at the island, on our second cup of coffee, when Enzo’s phone buzzes. He glances at it, frowns, puts it face-down on the counter.
“Who is it?”
“Nobody.”
“Enzo.”
He sighs. “Rafael.”
My stomach tightens. His brother. My ex-husband. The man I haven’t seen since I walked out of his house.
“What does he want?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t opened it.” He’s not looking at me now, staring at the phone like it might bite him. “He’s been reaching out. The past few weeks. Texts, mostly. I haven’t answered.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know what to say. Because every time I think about talking to him, I think about everything he did, to you, to me, and I can’t make myself do it.”
“What do the texts say?”
He picks up the phone. Scrolls. His jaw tightens as he reads.
“He wants to talk. Says things have changed.” A pause. “Says our father is sick.”
“Dante?”
“Yeah.” The name comes out flat. “Rafael says it’s serious. That we should talk before it’s too late.”
I’m quiet for a moment. Dante Vitale. The man who threw Enzo out at eighteen. The man who arranged my marriage to Rafael like he was moving pieces on a board. The man who looked at me across family dinners like I was a chair that hadn’t been dusted properly.
I should feel nothing. Or something close to satisfaction.
Instead I just feel tired.
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” He finally looks at me. There’s something raw in his face, a thing he usually keeps locked away. “Part of me wants to ignore it. Let the old man die without ever seeing me again. He made his choice when he threw me out. Why should I give him anything?”
“And the other part?”
“The other part remembers that he’s my father. That Rafael’s my brother. That whatever they did, they’re the only family I’ve got.”
I reach across the island. Take his hand again.
“Whatever you decide, I’m with you. If you want to see them, I’ll go with you. If you want to tell them to rot, I’ll help you write the message.”
He laughs. It’s not a happy sound, but it’s something.
“You’d come with me? Even though Rafael…”
“Especially because Rafael.” I tighten my grip on his hand. “You stood with me when my father came. You didn’t step in front of me. You stood next to me. Let me do that for you.”
He’s quiet a moment. Looking at me like he’s memorizing my face.
“Okay,” he says finally.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, let’s go. Today. Before I lose my nerve.”
“Today?”
“If I think about it any longer, I’ll talk myself out of it.” He picks up the phone again. Types a reply. Sends it. “I told him we’re coming.”
“We?”
“You said you’d come.”
“I did. I just didn’t think you’d take me up on it this fast.”
“I told you.” He stands, pulls me up with him. “Evolving.”
***
The drive takes an hour.
The city gives way to suburbs, then to the sprawling estates where the old families live. Tree-lined streets. Manicured lawns. A quiet that costs more than most people make in a year.
Enzo’s hands are tight on the wheel. He hasn’t said much since we got in the car.
“You grew up out here?” I ask.
“If you can call it that.”
“What was it like?”
“Cold.” He doesn’t say more. I don’t push.
The house appears at the end of a long driveway. Stone and ivy and too many windows. Imposing. Beautiful. A house that looks like a home in photographs and feels like a tomb in person.
We park. Neither of us moves.
“You don’t have to come in,” he says. “You can wait here. I wouldn’t blame you.”
“I’m coming in.”
“Rafael will be there. And my father.”
“I know.”
“Ana.”
“Enzo.” I reach over, take his hand. “I chose you. All of it. That means this too.”
He looks at me. Nods once.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”
***
Rafael opens the door himself.
That’s the first thing that lands, before I even look at his face.
There used to be staff for this. Elena, or one of the others, materializing in the foyer before a guest’s hand left the bell.
Now it’s just him, in the doorway, in a house that’s gone quiet behind him in a way it never was when I lived here.
He looks older than I remember. It’s only been a few months since the wedding, since everything fell apart, but there are lines on his face that weren’t there before. A tiredness in his eyes.
He looks at Enzo first. Then at me. Something flickers across his face, surprise, or a thing more complicated than that.