14. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
He showed up on my porch at nine the next morning.
No warning. No call ahead. Just Giovanni Ferraro standing on the steps of my rented cottage in a suit with no business in Savannah in July, holding a paper bag from the bakery down the street and looking like he hadn’t slept at all.
“I brought breakfast,” he said.
“I didn’t invite you.”
“I know.” He didn’t move. Didn’t try to come in. Just stood there on my porch with his expensive shoes and his paper bag and his eyes that looked like something had broken behind them and been reassembled wrong. “I need to say something. Then you can throw me out.”
Nico was inside, still sleeping. The morning light was soft and golden, the kind of Savannah morning that made you believe in second chances. I didn’t want to believe in second chances. I wanted to shut the door and go back to the life I’d built without him.
But he was here. And he wasn’t going away.
“Say it.”
He set down the paper bag. Straightened. Met my eyes with something close to courage.
“Take me back.”
The words settled between us and stayed.
“I know I don’t deserve it,” he continued.
“That I broke everything. That you left because I made it impossible to stay, and I know that nothing I say can undo three years of silence and secrets and the kind of absence that kills a marriage. But I’m asking anyway.
” His voice cracked. He kept going. “Take me back, Kylie. Remarry me. Let me spend the rest of my life proving that I can be the man you needed me to be.”
I stared at him.
He wasn’t performing. Wasn’t deploying charm, wasn’t calculating angles, wasn’t doing any of the things I’d learned to expect from him in five years of watching Giovanni Ferraro navigate the world.
He was just, standing there. Asking. With his heart in his hands and his pride on the ground and nothing between us but the truth.
“No.”
The word rang clear. Not cruel, I couldn’t be cruel to him, not when he looked like this, but certain.
“No, Giovanni. I’m not taking you back. I’m not remarrying you. The marriage is over. It ended the night I found those rings on my father’s file, and nothing you say is going to un-end it.”
I expected him to argue. To negotiate. To do what Giovanni always did when faced with an answer he didn’t like, find the angle, apply the pressure, turn no into yes through sheer force of will.
He didn’t.
He just nodded.
“Okay.”
The acceptance was worse than begging would have been. It meant he’d meant it when he said he understood what he’d done. Meant he’d actually changed, actually grown, actually become the man who could hear no and not try to change it.
I’d wanted this. I’d wanted him to be this person.
I just hadn’t expected it to feel like this.
“Then I’m not asking to be your husband,” he said. His voice was measured now. Controlled. But underneath it, I could hear the effort it was taking. “I’m asking for visiting hours.”
“What?”
“Nico. My son.” He said the words like they still surprised him.
Like he was still getting used to the shape of them in his mouth.
“I want to be part of his life. To know him. I want-” He stopped.
Started again. “I intend to earn the rest, Kylie. To prove to you, every day, that I’m not the man you left.
But that’s going to take time. And while I’m doing that, I’m asking you to let me know my son. ”
I looked at him, really looked, the way I hadn’t let myself look since he’d shown up on that sidewalk yesterday.
He was different. The arrogance that had always been part of him, as fundamental as his bone structure, had been…
not removed, but tempered. There was something quieter in him now. Something almost humble.
I hated how much I wanted to trust it.
“Come inside,” I said.
***
My kitchen table was too small for this conversation.
Giovanni sat on one side, his frame taking up too much space, his presence filling the room the way it had always filled rooms. I sat on the other, arms crossed, trying to remember that I was the one with the power here. He was in my house. My territory. My terms.
“Here’s how this works,” I said. “You can know Nico. I won’t use a child as a weapon - I’m not your family, Giovanni. I’m not going to punish you by keeping you from your son.”
Something moved across his face. Gratitude, maybe. Or just surprise.
“But,” I continued, “the marriage is over. We’re done. That part is not negotiable, not up for discussion, not something you can buy or bribe or lawyer your way back into. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” He didn’t look away when he said it.
“You’re not going to loom over my life. No showing up unannounced with grand gestures, and no using your resources to manipulate my circumstances or putting me in positions where I owe you anything.
You’re going to respect the boundaries I set, every single one, and if you don’t - if you push, even once - you lose access. To Nico and to me. Forever.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” I searched his face for the old tell, the sign of a man already working out a way around the rule.
“Because the Giovanni I knew didn’t understand boundaries.
The Giovanni I knew thought that rules were for other people, that he could fix any situation if he just applied enough pressure, that-”
“That Giovanni lost his wife and didn’t know he had a son.
” He cut me off, but gently. Without anger.
“That Giovanni spent a year in therapy learning exactly how much damage he’d done.
I’m not asking you to trust the man you left.
I’m asking you to give the man I’m becoming a chance to prove himself. ”
Therapy.
He’d said it yesterday, too, mentioned it in passing, but I hadn’t fully processed it. Giovanni Ferraro. In therapy. Sitting in some office somewhere, talking about his feelings to a stranger.
It didn’t fit the man I’d married. Didn’t fit the don who had built an empire on control and silence and the careful management of every variable.
But maybe that was the point.
“Visiting hours,” I said. “That’s what you’re asking for.”
“Yes.”
“Regular, scheduled visits. Not whenever you want - when I say. In my house, on my terms. You don’t take him anywhere without my explicit permission. No decisions about his life without consulting me. You don’t-”
“Kylie.” He leaned forward. Serious. Intent. “I will follow whatever rules you set. Every single one. You tell me when I can see him, for how long, under what conditions. I won’t argue, or push, or try to change your mind.”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Because I spent a year learning how to be wrong.” He held my gaze. “And because I already know what happens when I don’t listen to you. I lose you. I lost you. I’m not making that mistake again.”
I wanted to believe him. God help me, I wanted to believe him.
But I’d believed him before. I’d believed in the life he’d promised me, the partnership he’d offered, the marriage I’d thought we were building. And I’d been wrong.
I wasn’t going to be wrong again.
“We’ll start slow,” I said. “Supervised visits. Here, at my house. You come when I say, you leave when I say. No deviating. No surprises. If you do everything right - if you prove I can trust you - we’ll talk about expanding it.”
“Thank you.” The words were rough. Genuine. “Kylie, thank you-”
The sound of a car outside made us both freeze.
It was wrong. The engine pitch, the way it idled, too loud, too long, too deliberate for the quiet street where I’d chosen to live specifically because nothing ever happened on it.
Giovanni was on his feet before I could move.
“Stay here.”
“Giovanni-”
But he was already at the window, one hand moving to his hip where I knew he kept a weapon, his whole body transformed from the man who’d been sitting at my kitchen table into something harder. Sharper. The don I’d married, emerging from the person he was trying to become.
Through the window, I could see it: a dark sedan, parked across the street, with a man in the passenger seat pointing something at my house.
A camera.
Not a gun. A camera.
But Giovanni didn’t know that, and before I could process what was happening, he was out the front door and moving toward the car with the kind of controlled speed that said he was prepared to kill whoever was inside.
I grabbed Nico from his bassinet, awake now, startled by the sudden movement, and followed.
***
Giovanni’s security detail got there first.
I hadn’t even realized there was a security detail.
But three men materialized from somewhere, a car down the block, a position I hadn’t noticed, and had the sedan surrounded before Giovanni reached it.
They moved like soldiers, professional and efficient, and when they pulled the photographer out of the passenger seat, he came with his hands up and his face pale.
“I’m not - I’m just taking pictures - the building, I was photographing the building-”
“What building?” Giovanni’s voice was ice. Cold and hard and utterly terrifying. “What building were you photographing?”
“The building. Just the building, I swear-” But his eyes went past Giovanni to me, to the baby in my arms, and they stayed a beat too long before he caught himself. Not a man who cared about cornices. A man matching a face to a rumor.
One of Giovanni’s men was already on the phone, running the plates, checking the photographer’s story. It only took a minute.
“He’s not clean,” the man reported, voice flat. “Plate’s buried three shells deep behind a name we know out of Jersey. No development license, no permit, no company. He’s a scout, boss. Somebody paid him to put eyes on the theater and the woman who runs it and send back one thing - confirmation.”
The word dropped into my chest and sank. Confirmation. Not of a building. Of a face, a name, a child. The rumor was already moving through the families, and someone had sent a man to check if it was true.