9. Ursula
— ? —
Ursula
“I want to show you something.”
We’ve been driving for two hours, north out of the city, past the suburbs and the bedroom communities and into the kind of countryside I forget exists when I’m trapped in Manhattan. The trees are thick here, the air clean, the sky bigger than it has any right to be.
I haven’t asked where we’re going. Matteo said “trust me” when he picked me up this morning, and I found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I did.
“What kind of something?”
“The first thing I ever bought.” He takes a turn off the main road, onto a smaller one, then onto something that’s barely more than a dirt track. “When I had nothing. Before the company, before the tower, before any of it.”
“You bought property before you were successful?”
“I bought a ruin.” He smiles, but there’s something vulnerable in it that I’ve never seen before. “A falling-down lighthouse on a spit of rock that no one wanted. Paid three thousand dollars for it, which was every cent I had. Restored it with my own hands over fifteen years.”
The road ends at a rocky point of land, and there, rising from the rocks like something out of a fairy tale, stands a lighthouse.
It’s white and weathered and somehow beautiful, a building that has survived storms and time and neglect and come out the other side still standing.
“No one knows I own it,” Matteo says quietly. “Not my business partners. Not the press. It’s not on any paperwork connected to my name. It’s just... mine. The one thing that’s actually mine.”
I look out at the water while he talks, gray and heaving against the rocks, and something about it makes me shiver.
“It looks cold.”
“It’s worse than cold.” He follows my gaze. “This whole stretch of coast doesn’t pretend to be gentle. The water runs deep and the current does what it wants and it has no opinion on whether you live. That’s half of why I love it.”
“That’s a grim thing to love.”
“I never claimed to have healthy taste.” His mouth tilts. “I bought a haunted-looking ruin on a hard piece of coast and married my whole self to fixing it. Draw your own conclusions.”
I look at the heaving gray water a moment longer, and then I forget it, because he’s looking at me again like the water doesn’t frighten him half as much as I do.
I understand the lighthouse more than he knows. The need for something that belongs only to you, that no one can take away or claim or use against you.
“Why are you showing me?”
He looks at me, and the walls he keeps up at every gala, every dinner, are gone. In their place is something raw and honest and terrifying. “I don’t know. I just wanted you to see it.”
We walk up the path together, and he unlocks the door with a key from his pocket, and inside the lighthouse is nothing like I expected.
Warm and comfortable. Books everywhere, stacked on shelves and piled on tables and spilling off windowsills.
A worn leather couch facing a stone fireplace.
A kitchen that’s clearly been used, with copper pots hanging from hooks and dried herbs in jars on the counter. This isn’t a showpiece. This is a home.
“You did all this yourself?”
“Most of it. The major structural work required professionals, but the rest...” He runs his hand along the doorframe, a gesture that’s almost tender. “I learned as I went. Made a lot of mistakes. Fixed them. Made more. It took fifteen years.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s imperfect.”
“That’s why it’s beautiful.”
He looks at me then, really looks, and I feel seen in a way I haven’t felt in years. Maybe ever. Bennett never looked at me like this. Bennett looked through me.
“I’ll make coffee,” he says finally. “Or there’s tea, if you prefer.”
“Coffee is fine.”
I wander while he works in the kitchen, examining the books (eclectic, ranging from maritime history to philosophy to what appears to be an entire shelf of trashy romance novels), the photographs (the same woman from his office, his mother I assume, in various stages of her life), the small objects that tell the story of a person (a compass, a carved wooden boat, a collection of sea glass in a jar).
“The romance novels,” I call out. “Really?”
“They belonged to my grandmother.” He appears in the doorway with two mugs. “She read one a week until she died. Left me the collection in her will, along with strict instructions to read at least three before I ‘judged them.’”
“And did you?”
“I read twenty-seven.” He hands me a mug, and his smile is sheepish and charming and utterly disarming. “They’re better than you’d think.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
We drink our coffee and we talk, really talk, about nothing important and everything important all at once.
About his grandmother, who raised him after his mother died.
About my mother, who taught me that being soft wasn’t the same as being weak.
About the loneliness of success, the isolation of being the person everyone wants something from.
I don’t know how long we’ve been talking when I notice the sky through the window has gone dark.
“What time is it?”
Matteo checks his watch and swears softly. “After seven. We should go, the drive back...”
He’s interrupted by thunder that shakes the windows and makes you think about gods and apocalypses. And then the rain starts.
Not rain. A deluge. Like someone has opened a faucet in the sky.
Matteo moves to the window, looks out, and swears again, louder this time. “The causeway.”
“What about it?”
“It floods during storms. It’s probably underwater by now.” He turns to face me, his jaw tight, his eyes frustrated and a little wild. “We’re trapped.”
“For how long?”
“Until the storm passes and the water goes down. Could be a few hours. Could be...” He trails off.
“Could be all night.”
“Yes.”
I should be upset. I should be worried about propriety, about appearances, about what people will say. But standing in this lighthouse with the storm raging outside and Matteo looking at me like he’s not sure whether to apologize or celebrate, I find that I don’t care about any of that.
“Well.” I set down my coffee mug. “I suppose you’d better make dinner.”
The tension breaks. He laughs, surprised and genuine, and moves toward the kitchen. “I can do that. Nothing fancy, but I won’t let you starve.”
Dinner is simple, pasta with olive oil and garlic, bread that’s slightly stale, wine that’s significantly better than it should be.
We eat at the small table by the window, watching the storm rage over the water, and something loosens in my chest that has been clenched for longer than I can remember.
Peace.
“Cards?” Matteo produces a battered deck from a drawer. “We need to pass the time somehow.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Poker.” His smile is sharp. “But since we’ve no chips, we’ll play for stakes.”
“What kind of stakes?”
“Questions, truths, small cruelties.” He shuffles the deck with practiced ease. “I win a hand, you tell me something true. Something you’ve never told anyone. You win, same terms.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“That’s the point.”
I lose the first hand. I’m not even sure how, I’m usually good at poker, but something about his eyes across the table is making it hard to concentrate.
“Truth,” he says. “Tell me something no one knows.”
I think about deflecting, about telling him something small and meaningless. But the wine is warming my blood and the fire is crackling and outside the storm is making the whole world feel temporary, unreal, like anything said here won’t count in the morning.
“My mother’s funeral,” I say finally. “I didn’t cry. Everyone thought I was cold. Everyone thought I didn’t love her. But the truth is, I loved her so much that if I started crying, I was afraid I’d never stop. So I went home that night and I screamed into a pillow for six hours.”
He considers that for a moment. Then he reaches across the table and takes my hand, just for a second, a brief squeeze that says more than words could.
“Second hand.”
He wins again. I tell him about Bennett proposing, about how I’d hoped, really hoped, that I could be enough. About how I spent all those years trying to prove something to a man who was never paying attention.
Third hand. I win.
“Truth.” I lean forward. “Tell me something you’ve never said out loud.”
He doesn’t answer right away. The fire crackles. The storm howls. Finally, he speaks.
“I grew up with nothing. You know that. What you don’t know is what nothing feels like.
The hunger that never really leaves, even when your refrigerator is full.
The fear that one wrong move will take everything away.
The way you learn to watch people, to read them, because your survival depends on it. ”
“Is that how you learned to read me?”
“Partly.” He meets my eyes. “Partly I just couldn’t look away.”
We keep playing. We keep drinking. The truths get bigger, darker, more dangerous.
I tell him about finding Bennett and Renata, about the moment when she didn’t stop, about the way that image is burned into my brain and won’t go away no matter how hard I try.
He tells me about the first time someone called him “sir,” and how he didn’t know how to respond.
About the loneliness of building an empire and having no one to share it with.
By midnight, we’ve abandoned the cards entirely. We’re sitting on the floor in front of the fire, the bottle of wine between us, and Matteo is doing an impression of Bennett that’s so accurate I snort wine out my nose.
“Stop,” I gasp, coughing and laughing at the same time. “Stop, I can’t breathe.”
“‘I’m Bennett Rothwell,’” he continues in a pitch-perfect imitation of my husband’s pompous drawl. “‘I’m very important. My family has boats. Did you know my family has boats? Let me tell you about my boats.’”
I’m laughing so hard I fall over. Actually fall over, onto my back on the rug, staring up at the ceiling while my whole body shakes with it. I haven’t laughed like this in years. Maybe ever. I didn’t know I still could.
Matteo falls over too, landing beside me, and now we’re both on the floor, gasping, tears streaming down our faces, unable to stop.
“Your face,” he manages. “When the wine came out your nose. I thought you were going to die.”
“I almost did. You almost killed me with a Bennett impression.”
“What a way to go.”
“The headline writes itself. ‘Ice Queen Drowns in Wine During Storm.’”
He laughs again, and I laugh again, and slowly, gradually, the laughter fades. We’re lying side by side on the rug, the firelight moving over both of us, and I turn my head to find him already looking at me.
The laughter stops.
We’re very close. His hand is on my waist. I don’t remember him putting it there, but I’m not complaining. My fingers are in his hair. I don’t remember putting them there either.
The fire pops low in the grate and the storm keeps screaming outside, and all of it shrinks to this moment, this room, this man.
“Ursula,” he says, and it sounds like a prayer.
“Matteo.”
“I’m going to kiss you now.”
“Yes.”
His mouth meets mine, and the world catches fire.