16. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
He showed up on my porch with flowers in his fist like a weapon he wasn’t sure how to deploy.
Not an arrangement, not a bouquet wrapped in tissue and ribbon. Just flowers, wildflowers, the kind that grew along the riverbank, stems crushed slightly where his grip had been too tight, held out in front of him as if to placate an unpredictable god.
“I have a proposal,” he said.
“The answer is still no.”
“Not that kind of proposal.” His ears were red.
Giovanni Ferraro, don of New York, the most feared man on the eastern seaboard, was standing on my porch with red ears and a fistful of flowers, all the poise of a boy asking someone to prom.
“One evening. No expectations. No-” He stopped.
Started again. “I’m asking you to dinner.
Properly. The way I should have asked you six years ago, before I made it about politics and alliances and everything except the fact that I wanted to spend time with you. ”
I stared at him.
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not blushing.”
“Your ears are literally crimson.”
“It’s warm.” He thrust the flowers at me with slightly more force than necessary. “One evening, Kylie. That’s all I’m asking. You can say no. Say yes and then change your mind. Walk out in the middle if I’m boring you. But let me try.”
I took the flowers. They smelled like the river and something else, something green and wild, like he’d picked them himself instead of sending someone.
“Did you actually pick these?”
“There’s a bank about a mile past the theater.” He wasn’t looking at me. “I may have trespassed slightly.”
“The don of New York committed petty trespassing to pick me wildflowers.”
“Allegedly.”
I felt my mouth twitch. Fought it down. Lost.
“Fine.”
His head came up. “Fine?”
“One evening. No expectations.” I pointed at him with the flowers. “And if you’re boring, I’m leaving.”
“Understood.” His whole face had changed, still careful, still controlled, but underneath it something bright and almost young. “Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock. Wear shoes you can walk in.”
“Why do I need walking shoes?”
But he was already retreating down my steps, his pace just slightly faster than dignity allowed.
***
The car that picked me up the next evening wasn’t a limousine.
It was a truck. His truck, the one he’d driven down from New York, mud still caked on the wheel wells. Giovanni was behind the wheel in jeans and a button-down, shirtsleeves pushed up, which I chose to take personally.
I climbed in before I could talk myself out of it.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t like surprises.”
“I know.” He pulled away from the curb. “But you’ll like this one.”
We drove through the historic district, past the squares I’d learned to navigate, past the theater with its scaffolding and promises. When he turned onto a road I didn’t recognize, heading toward the outskirts of the city, I sat up straighter.
“Giovanni.”
“Trust me.”
“Those are terrifying words coming from you.”
“I know.” He almost smiled. “But try anyway.”
The Whitfield mansion appeared through the trees like something out of a fever dream.
I’d seen it before. Everyone in Savannah had seen it, the Gothic Revival ruin behind the iron fence, all broken windows and collapsing porches and the kind of architectural tragedy that made people like me want to weep.
I’d stood outside that fence countless times, cataloging the details I could see through the overgrowth: the original gingerbread trim, the widow’s walk listing dangerously to the left, the rose window that had somehow survived a hundred years of neglect.
The gate was open.
“Giovanni.”
He pulled through the entrance and parked on what had once been a circular drive. “I may have acquired temporary access.”
“Temporary access.”
“The current owner owed me a favor.” He reached into the backseat and produced two hard hats, bright yellow, with the Ferraro Construction logo on the side. “Legally. Mostly.”
“‘Mostly’ is doing a lot of work there.”
“There may have been a small zoning issue that I helped resolve.” He handed me a hard hat. “The point is, we have permission to be here. For one night. I thought you might want to see the inside.”
I was out of the truck before he finished speaking.
The interior was a disaster. A beautiful, heartbreaking, absolutely magnificent disaster.
“The foundation is limestone,” I said, running my hand along a wall that had survived everything the Georgia climate could throw at it. “Original. You can tell by the tooling marks - see here, how they’re irregular? Machine-cut stone came later.”
Giovanni followed me through room after room, stepping over debris, ducking under collapsed beams. He had a flashlight in one hand and his phone in the other, and I realized with a start that he was taking notes.
“What are you doing?”
“Documenting.” He held up his phone. “You’re talking fast. I want to remember.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re interesting when you talk about buildings.” He said it simply. Like it was obvious. Like of course he wanted to remember every word I said about load-bearing walls and original molding profiles. “Keep going.”
I kept going.
For two hours, I walked him through the Whitfield mansion’s bones.
Showed him where the original structure ended and the additions began.
Explained how the widow’s walk had been built to support three times its current weight, which was why it had survived when so much else had failed.
Traced the water damage patterns and explained what they meant about the roofing history.
He asked questions. Real questions, not the polite noises people made when they were pretending to listen. Questions about structural integrity and material sourcing and the decision-making process behind restoration versus preservation.
“The rose window,” I said, standing in what had once been the ballroom, looking up at the stained glass that caught the last of the evening light.
“That’s original too. Tiffany-style, probably a local artisan working from Tiffany patterns.
It would have been the most expensive element in the house when it was built. ”
“It’s survived a hundred years of neglect.”
“Good bones.” I touched the wall beneath it. “That’s what matters in a building. You can fix almost anything if the bones are good.”
Giovanni was quiet a beat.
“And if the bones are broken?”
I turned to look at him. He wasn’t looking at the window anymore. He was looking at me, and there was something in his expression that made my chest tight.
“Then you have to be honest about what can be saved,” I said. “And what needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.”
We stood there for a long moment. The light through the rose window painted colors across his face, blue and gold and something that looked almost like rose, warming the angles of him, making him look softer than he was.
“I brought food,” he said finally. “If you’re hungry.”
***
The picnic was set up in the old conservatory.
Drop cloths covered the debris. Battery-powered lanterns cast warm light across a spread that included everything from prosciutto to the honey cake I’d mentioned loving once, three years ago, at a dinner party where I’d thought he wasn’t paying attention.
“You remembered the honey cake.”
“I remember everything.” He sat down on the drop cloth, crossed his legs, and looked up at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be casual. “Are you going to eat or just stand there?”
I sat.
The food was good. The conversation was better. We talked about architecture and business and the chaos of restoration timelines. About Nico, his first attempts at sitting up, the sound he made when he was frustrated, the way he’d started grabbing for things with increasing determination.
“He has your stubbornness,” Giovanni said.
“He has your glare.”
“I don’t glare.”
“You’re glaring right now.”
I was, which only proved his point.
“This is my face. I can’t help my face.”
“Your face is very glare-forward.”
He laughed. Actually laughed, the sound surprising in the ruined conservatory, bouncing off the broken glass ceiling.
I’d forgotten he could do that.
We walked back to the truck as the stars came out, picking our way through the overgrowth. Giovanni’s hand hovered at my back, not touching, just there, near enough to feel the heat coming off him through my jacket.
When we turned onto the main road, the Marlowe came into view.
And the marquee was on.
I made him stop the truck.
For thirty years, that marquee had been dark. Broken, abandoned, written off by everyone who’d ever assessed the building’s restoration potential. I’d looked at the estimates myself, the wiring alone would have cost more than my entire first-year budget.
Now it blazed against the night sky, white and gold, the letters spelling out THE MARLOWE THEATER in bulbs that must have been replaced individually, by hand, one at a time.
“Giovanni.”
“It was for the theater.” His voice was carefully neutral. “The restoration needed a focal point. Something to generate public interest, community investment-”
“Giovanni.”
“-and the historical significance of the original signage-”
“You absolute bastard.”
He stopped talking.
I got out of the truck.
The light from the marquee spilled across the square, turning the cobblestones gold. I stood in the middle of it, looking up at thirty years of darkness suddenly, impossibly bright, and felt something come loose behind my ribs that I’d kept sealed for months.
He’d done this.
Not with a grand gesture, not with the kind of dramatic declaration that could be resisted. Just quietly, persistently, while I wasn’t looking. Funding the work, enabling the progress, standing back and letting me believe it was all my own achievement.
This was how he loved.
I heard him get out of the truck. Heard his footsteps on the cobblestones. Felt him stop behind me, close enough to feel his warmth, far enough that he wasn’t touching.
“Kylie.”
I turned.
The light found his face and made his eyes glow, luminous, almost vulnerable. He looked like he was bracing for rejection, for gratitude he didn’t want, for anything except what I did next.
And I was cataloguing him again, without permission, the way I’d promised myself I’d stopped: the undone top button, the line of his throat, the way the marquee light caught the edge of his jaw and the tendon in his neck when he swallowed, nervous, waiting.
Don’t, said the sensible part of me, the part that had packed a suitcase and boarded a plane and rebuilt an entire life out of the wreckage of wanting this exact man.
You know how this ends. You have a son asleep three blocks away. Do not-
My mouth had gone dry. My pulse was somewhere up under my jaw, keeping time with his.
I grabbed his lapel.
Pulled him down.
And kissed him like the marquee going dark again.
His response was immediate. One hand came up to cup the back of my head, the other settling at my waist, and he kissed me back with the kind of focused intensity that had always made me forget my own name.
His mouth was hot and demanding, and I could feel his restraint in the tension of his shoulders, the careful control of his hands, the way he let me lead even when every line of his body was begging to take over.
I pulled back.
His breathing was ragged. His hand was still in my hair. And his face. God, his face. Open and wanting and holding himself so deliberately still.
“No,” I said.
“No,” he agreed.
I backed away. Put space between us. Pointed at him like he was under arrest.
“This doesn’t mean anything.”
“Understood.” He didn’t argue. He never argued anymore, which was somehow harder to fight than the arguing had been.
“I’m not - we’re not-”
“I know.”
He stood there in the light of his own ridiculous marquee, jacket wrinkled where I’d grabbed him, looking at me like I’d just given him something precious instead of pushing him away.
“Goodnight, Kylie.”
He turned. Started walking across the square toward his building, his pace unhurried, his shoulders straight. No lingering. No last look. No attempt to leverage the moment into something more.
He was halfway across the square when I cracked.
“Tuesday.”
He stopped.
The theater door creaked as I pushed it open behind me. I stood in the doorway, disgusted with myself, unable to stop.
“Nico has swim class. If you want.”
Giovanni turned.
The marquee light caught his face, the surprise, the hope, the careful way he held himself like he was afraid of wanting too much, and I watched him smile like he’d just been handed the world.