23. Nina
— ? —
Nina
He takes me to Bowen’s Wharf.
Not one of the fancy restaurants where the Moretti name opens doors - just a small café by the water, the kind of place tourists love and locals actually eat at. We sit outside despite the cool evening, and the harbor spreads out before us like a promise.
“No yacht,” I observe.
“Did you want a yacht?”
“God, no.” I laugh. “I always hated those parties. All that posturing on the water.”
He grins, and it hits me like a sucker punch - that grin. The one that made me say yes to a second date twelve years ago. The one I’ve been pretending doesn’t still work on me.
I look away. Focus very hard on the menu.
It’s a laminated menu, Nina. There are four things on it. Stop hiding behind the laminated menu.
“I know.” He looks almost sheepish, turning his coffee cup in slow circles. “I was trying to impress you with all of it, back in the beginning. The yacht. The houses. The endless parade of society things. I thought you wanted that life.”
“What made you think that?”
“Because you married into it.” He shrugs. “I assumed you wanted what came with the name.”
“I wanted you. The name was... complicated.”
“I know that now.”
We order coffee - just coffee, nothing elaborate - and I watch him fidget with his cup. The great Adrian Moretti, nervous on a date with his own wife. There’s something in it that makes my chest hurt in a way I’m not ready to examine.
“You planned everything around me,” I say slowly. “Didn’t you.”
“What do you mean?”
“This café. The Cliff Walk after. No fancy dinners, no performances.” I meet his eyes. “You asked yourself what I would actually enjoy, instead of what would look impressive.”
He smiles - a real smile, the first one I’ve seen from him in months.
“You noticed.”
“I notice everything about you, Adrian. I always have.”
The silence that follows is different from the silences we’ve been living in. Less heavy. More open. He holds my eyes a beat too long, and something flickers there - a memory, unmistakable, of a storm and candlelight and a bedroom door - and heat crawls up the back of my neck.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I think it hourly,” he says, entirely without shame, and takes a sip of his coffee like he hasn’t just set my whole nervous system on fire. “But we’re not talking about that. This is a first date. I’m being a gentleman.”
“You’re being smug.”
“I’m being patient. It looks similar from the outside.”
I kick him under the table. He absorbs it with the serenity of a man who has decided to be delighted by everything I do, which is somehow more infuriating than if he’d flinched.
We are not talking about the storm, I remind myself. We agreed. It doesn’t change anything.
My body would like the record to show that it disagrees.
“Tell me about your cottage,” he says.
“What about it?”
“Everything. The furniture. The view. Why you picked that specific one instead of any other place in Newport.”
So I tell him. About the estate sales and the rocking chair and the mural I’m attempting in the nursery.
About waking up to the harbor light and the way the cottage feels like mine in a way the mansion never did.
About the drunk boats, which he defends with sudden gallantry - “they’re not drunk, they’re celebrating” - and I have to put my coffee down because I’m laughing too hard to hold it steady.
He listens.
Not the polite listening of someone waiting for their turn to speak - the deep listening of someone who wants to understand.
He asks follow-up questions. He remembers things I said twenty minutes ago and connects them to things I said ten years ago.
It’s like being excavated, gently, by someone who has finally decided the dig site matters.
“You built a whole life,” he says when I finish. “In two months. From nothing.”
“I had to know I could.”
“I know.” He reaches across the table. “And I’m proud of you.”
“You’re proud of me?”
“For standing on your own feet. For refusing to let what I did break you. For building something that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s money or permission.” He squeezes my hand. “It’s the strongest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.”
There’s no answer big enough for that. So I just let him hold my hand, and we sit there watching the boats move across the harbor, and I pretend the warmth spreading through me is the coffee.
***
The Cliff Walk is quiet at sunset.
We walk side by side, close enough that our shoulders brush with every third step. Each contact sends a small shock through me - awareness I don’t want, heat I haven’t earned back the right to ignore.
The ocean stretches endless beside us, and I think about all the times we’ve been here before - all the casual strolls and society events and moments that felt like nothing at the time.
This feels like something.
His hand keeps swinging near mine. Almost touching. Not quite.
The space between our fingers feels like the most important distance in the world.
“I used to be afraid of this,” Adrian says suddenly.
“Of what?”
“The Cliff Walk. The edge.” He gestures at the rocks below. “When I was a kid, I convinced myself the whole thing was going to crumble and take me with it.”
“That’s oddly specific.”
“I know.” He laughs. “But I remember standing here at maybe eight years old, watching the waves crash, thinking: any second now, the ground will give way.”
“What changed?”
“I realized the cliff has been here for thousands of years.” He turns to look at me. “It wasn’t going anywhere. I was just scared of something solid.”
I stop walking. “Is that a metaphor?”
“Maybe.” His eyes hold mine. “I spent ten years being afraid you’d leave. Waiting for the ground to give way. And the whole time, you were right there. Solid as stone.”
“Until I wasn’t.”
“Until I pushed you away.” He steps closer. “That’s the thing I finally understand, Nina. The cliff didn’t crumble. I tried to jump off it.”
“Adrian-”
“I’m not asking for forgiveness,” he says quickly. “I’m just... I want you to know that I see it now. What I did. What I almost lost.”
I look at him - this man I’ve loved for ten years, this man who broke my heart with his fear - and I feel something shift.
The night at the cottage was panic. Grief. Need.
This is different.
This is choice.
I lean forward.
His breath catches. His eyes drop to my mouth. His hand comes up - slow, careful, like I’m something that might break - and cups my jaw. His thumb traces my cheekbone, one pass, feather-light, and my whole body leans into it like a plant toward sun.
Do it, something in me whispers. You already know how he tastes. You’ve known for twelve years. One inch. That’s all it is. One inch and you’re home.
The wind comes off the water. Below us, a wave breaks and drags back over the rocks, and I can hear my own heartbeat over all of it.
I want this. God, I want this so badly my teeth ache with it.
Which is exactly why I can’t have it yet.
Because the last time I wanted him this much, I was standing in a foyer holding an ultrasound photo, and want wasn’t enough.
Want has never been the problem. Trust is the problem, and trust doesn’t live in his hands or his mouth or the six inches between us.
Trust lives in time, and we haven’t served ours yet.
“Not yet,” I whisper.
For one second his eyes close - just one, like a man absorbing a blow he agrees he deserves - and then his hand drops, and he steps back, and he smiles.
“Okay,” he says. His voice is rough. “Not yet.”
Not fine. Not how much longer. Just - okay.
And then he tucks my hand into the crook of his elbow like we’re an old couple from another century, and turns us back toward the car, and starts telling me a ridiculous story about Bernard the cooking instructor as though his pulse isn’t hammering under my fingers where they rest against his arm.
I walk away before I can change my mind.
Well. I walk. He walks with me.
Turns out that’s the part I missed most.
***
My phone buzzes as we reach the car.
It’s a screenshot, forwarded from a friend on the auxiliary committee with three exclamation points and a thought you should see this. Vivienne - exiled, ruined, and apparently not finished - holding court in somebody’s group chat.
Reconciliation, they’re calling it. For the baby’s sake, obviously. I hear there’s a new prenup involved. That poor girl never did understand how these families work.
The old me would have swallowed it whole. Carried it home alone. Let it burrow.
I hand Adrian the phone.
He reads it. His jaw does the dangerous thing, and then - deliberately, visibly - undoes it. “Well,” he says, handing it back. “She spelled your name right this time. Growth.”
“Adrian.”
“Do you want me to be angry? I can be angry. I keep some on hand.”
“No.” I delete the screenshot, and it costs me nothing, which is its own small miracle. “I want you to drive me home and let her perform for an empty room.”
He opens my door. But as we pull away from the curb, his eyes find mine in the mirror, and we’re both thinking the same thing.
Wounded animals bite hardest on the way down.
Vivienne Lockhart isn’t finished with us yet.