Chapter Twenty-One
LIVIA
I don’t remember sitting down on the kitchen floor. I just remember being there, back against the cabinet, knees pulled up, the cold tile seeping through my t-shirt while the front door’s echo still hung in the air like something that hadn’t finished happening.
Nico is still asleep. The monitor on the counter blinks its small green light, indifferent to the fact that his entire world just changed shape while he dreamed about racetracks and dragons.
I keep looking at that light, that steady, mechanical pulse, because it’s the only thing in the room behaving the way it’s supposed to.
I don’t know how long I sit there. Long enough that my legs go numb.
Long enough that the grey light through the window turns into something closer to morning, pale and flat and entirely unsympathetic to the wreckage currently occupying the cottage kitchen.
I replay the conversation in pieces, out of order, the way the mind does when it’s trying to protect itself from the whole of something too large to hold at once.
His stillness. The exact angle of his shoulders when he asked the question, like he already knew, like he was only confirming something he’d spent days assembling alone.
The particular silence after I said yes, before either of us said anything else, a silence with enough weight in it to flatten a person.
I think about calling him. I get as far as picking up my own phone, scrolling to his name, before I put it back down, because I don’t actually know what I would say, and because some old instinct insists that the right thing to do right now is nothing at all.
Just sit. Just wait. Just let the wreckage settle before I try to move through it.
When Piper lets herself in — she has a key, has had one since the second day, because she decided unilaterally that the situation required backup and I didn’t have the energy to argue — she finds me exactly where I’ve been for the last hour.
“Okay.” She drops her bag by the door, takes one look at my face, and crosses the kitchen without another word.
She sits down on the floor across from me, in her work clothes, on tile that is absolutely going to leave a mark on those pants, and doesn’t say anything else for a long moment. “You don’t have to talk yet.”
“He knows.”
So much for not talking yet.
Piper’s expression doesn’t change, exactly, but something in it settles, like she’s been braced for this specific sentence since the moment she saw my face. “Knows what, specifically. I need the full scope before I can appropriately panic.”
“Venice. Nico. All of it.” My voice comes out flat, scraped clean of anything resembling composure. “He asked me this morning. Just asked. Standing at the counter like he already knew the answer and just needed me to say it out loud.”
“And you told him.”
“I couldn’t lie again. Not after” I stop. There are some things I’m not ready to say even to Piper, even now, even with my whole life currently in pieces on this kitchen floor.
“Not after last night,” Piper finishes for me, gently, and I don’t correct her, because she’s not wrong, even if she doesn’t know the half of what last night actually contained.
“He went very still,” I say. “I told him everything. The masks, the antibiotics, finding out, trying to find him, Dante, running. All of it. And he just got quieter and quieter until I couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all, and then he said” My voice cracks.
I press the back of my hand against my mouth for a second before I can finish.
“He said I let him hold his own son and called it a performance.”
Piper is quiet for a moment. “That’s a brutal thing to say.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s true and brutal. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” She reaches over and takes my hand, the cold tile be damned, her grip firm in the way it’s always been since university, since the seminar, since every disaster I’ve ever called her in the middle of. “And then he left.”
“He walked out. Didn’t slam the door. Didn’t yell. Just left.” I look down at our hands. “I don’t know where he is.”
“He’ll be back.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually.” Piper’s voice has lost its usual edge of irony, gone quiet and certain in a way that makes me look up at her properly for the first time since she sat down.
“Livia. I’ve watched that man with your son for three days.
I’ve watched him build racetracks on a rug like it’s the most important infrastructure project of his career.
I’ve watched him learn which corner Nico likes to crash his cars into.
That’s not a man performing for an audience.
That’s not even a man doing his due diligence on a fake fiancée’s kid for optics. ”
“Then what is it?”
“He doesn’t look at Nico like property,” Piper says.
“He doesn’t look at him like a liability, or a complication, or a threat to his carefully managed life, even though by every metric that man uses to run his business, Nico probably qualifies as all three.
He looks at him like a man starving at a window.
Like something he’s been hungry for his whole life and didn’t let himself admit it until it was standing right in front of him. ”
The words land somewhere under my ribs and stay there, aching.
“You didn’t see his face the first morning,” Piper continues, quieter now.
“When Nico ran up to him about the racetrack, before either of you knew anything. I did. I was standing right there refilling my coffee, completely irrelevant, completely invisible, and I watched that man’s whole face change in about half a second, like something in him had been waiting his entire life for exactly that a small, loud, demanding person who wanted nothing from him except his attention.
Men who are performing don’t look like that, Livia.
They can fake interest. They can fake warmth, even charm, if they’re skilled enough, and Valentino Ferretti is plenty skilled.
But nobody fakes that particular kind of helpless.
I’ve seen him in business mode. I’ve seen him manage rooms full of powerful people without breaking a sweat.
He has never once looked that unguarded doing any of it. ”
“He’s not going to walk away from that,” Piper goes on.
“He might need today. He might need a week. But a man who looks at a four-year-old the way Valentino Ferretti looks at your son does not disappear from that boy’s life.
Whatever he’s feeling about you right now, however angry, however betrayed.
He is not going to let that override what he clearly already feels for Nico. ”
“That’s the part I’m afraid of.” The admission comes out before I’ve fully decided to say it, raw and unrehearsed.
“Not that he’ll hate me. I mean, I am afraid of that too, obviously, but” I press my palms against my eyes.
“What if he wants Nico and not me? What if this ends with him in Nico’s life completely, lawyers and custody arrangements and weekends and birthdays, and I’m just the woman who kept his son from him for four years?
What if the version of this where he’s a father to Nico doesn’t include me at all? ”
Piper doesn’t answer right away, which is unlike her, and the silence stretches long enough that I finally look up.
“I can’t tell you that’s not going to happen,” she says finally.
“I’m not going to lie to you and pretend I know how this plays out.
But I can tell you that the man who walked out of here this morning instead of staying to fight, instead of making demands, instead of immediately calling a lawyer, isn’t a man who’s already decided to cut you out.
That’s a man who needed to leave before he said something he couldn’t take back. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“There is. Trust me. I’ve dated men who make demands the second they’re hurt. Valentino isn’t doing that. He’s doing the thing you do, actually, when something terrifies you too much to look at directly. He’s leaving the room.”
I let that sit for a moment, the parallel uncomfortable and probably accurate.
“I’m going to give him space,” I say eventually, more to myself than to her, testing the shape of the decision out loud.
“One day. I’m not going to chase him down or text him or show up wherever he’s gone.
I owe him that much, after four years of not giving him a choice in any of this.
He gets a day to be furious without me in the room. ”
“And then?”
“And then I face whatever comes. Lawyers, custody, all of it. I’ll face it.
” My voice steadies as I say it, some old, stubborn resolve surfacing underneath the wreckage.
“I’ve spent four years being the only adult in Nico’s life who had to be strong about everything.
I know how to do hard things. I just thought I’d get to do this one with more warning. ”
Piper squeezes my hand once and lets go, reaching instead for her phone, which has been buzzing insistently in her bag for the last several minutes in a way she’s been very deliberately ignoring.
She glances at the screen. Her jaw tightens.
“Who is it?”
“No one.”
“Piper.”
“It’s logistics.” She types something, frowning, then deletes it. Types again. Deletes that too.
I watch this happen three more times before I find enough of myself to be amused by it, a small, fragile thing surfacing through the wreckage of the morning.
“Since when do you draft texts?”
“I’m not drafting.” She doesn’t look up from the screen. “I’m editing. For maximum hostility.”
“That’s the same thing, Piper.”
“It is not the same thing. Drafting implies care. This is tactical.” She finally sets the phone face-down on the floor beside her, like it’s personally offended her, and exhales hard through her nose.
“Dominic Calder wants to discuss gala logistics for the consortium closing event. In person. This afternoon.”
“And that requires four drafts and visible blood pressure because—”
“Because the man is insufferable and apparently also competent, which is a combination I find deeply destabilizing.” She says it with such genuine irritation that I almost laugh, the sound surprising me as it leaves my chest, thin and a little broken but real.
“He redirected your father yesterday without making a production of it. I’ve been trying to find a way to acknowledge that doesn’t sound like I’m thanking him, because I refuse to thank Dominic Calder for anything, on principle, possibly forever. ”
“You could just say thank you.”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s two words.”
“It’s a slippery slope, is what it is. You thank a man once for handling your work nemesis’s predatory father, and suddenly he thinks you’re capable of basic human warmth, and then where does it end.
” She picks the phone back up, looks at it like it’s personally wronged her, and sets it down again.
“I’m not doing this right now. You are sitting on a kitchen floor in the wreckage of your entire life, and I am not going to spend this moment discussing my completely unrelated, entirely manageable feelings about Dominic Calder. ”
“They don’t sound very manageable.”
“They’re extremely manageable. I manage them daily, with great skill.”
Despite everything, despite the hour, despite the precise and specific devastation currently sitting in my chest where Valentino’s face was this morning, I find myself laughing again, properly this time, the sound cracking somewhere in the middle into something closer to crying, and Piper doesn’t comment on the transition.
She just moves closer, on the cold tile, in her ruined trousers, and puts her arm around me, and lets me fall apart properly for the first time since the front door closed.
“He’ll come back,” she says quietly, into the top of my head.
“Not because I know everything. But because I know what it looks like when a man is running from something he’s scared of feeling too much, instead of running away from feeling it at all.
Those are different animals, Livia. I’ve seen both. This is the first one.”
I don’t know if she’s right. I don’t know anything right now, except that Nico is going to wake up in a little while, hungry and unaware, asking where Valentino is the way he’s started doing every morning this week, and I am going to have to find an answer that doesn’t break either of us further than this morning already has.
I think about what I’ll say when he asks, the careful, age-appropriate phrasing I’ll have to invent on the spot, something true enough to hold up later and gentle enough not to frighten a four-year-old who has no idea his entire world just shifted on its axis while he slept.
But I let myself believe her, just for a moment, sitting on the floor of a cottage that was supposed to be temporary and somehow became the place where everything I’d been running from finally caught up to me.
I think about the version of myself who walked into Valentino’s office for that interview, coffee soaking through her blouse, certain that the worst thing that could happen was a bad first impression.
That woman had no idea what was coming. I almost feel sorry for her, the same way you feel sorry for someone in a memory who doesn’t yet know what the story is actually about.
One day. I’ll give him one day.
And then, whatever comes, I’ll face it standing up.