CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Behind the Door
The last guests left a little after midnight, and I stayed in the ballroom afterward, helping the staff clear the tables longer than I strictly needed to, unwilling yet to go upstairs and be alone with whatever conversation might be waiting there.
Dante had disappeared somewhere around eleven thirty, ostensibly to see Alessandra and Mia settled for the night after the strain of the evening, and I told myself, folding a stack of linens that didn’t need folding, that this too was reasonable, that a frightened woman and her exhausted daughter deserved to be checked on after a night like this one.
I found Luca in the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of water, and we stood together for a few minutes in companionable silence before he spoke.
“That was a hell of a thing my mother did tonight.”
“It was.”
“You handled it better than she deserved.”
“I’ve had practice,” I said, and the dry honesty of it surprised a short laugh out of both of us, though neither laugh held much real humor.
“Dante should have shut that down harder,” Luca said, quieter now, glancing toward the hallway as though checking whether anyone might overhear. “I’ve told him as much before tonight. He doesn’t see it the way the rest of us do.”
“What way is that?”
Luca hesitated, clearly weighing how much to say. “That he’s let this whole situation with Alessandra get away from him without ever noticing. He thinks he’s just being decent. Handling a crisis. He doesn’t see what it’s costing you, because it’s never once cost him anything.”
I didn’t answer, uncertain what to say to a truth I’d already arrived at myself weeks earlier, and Luca, seeming to sense he’d said more than he meant to, excused himself with a tired goodnight.
I went looking for Dante after that, wanting, despite everything, to give him one more chance to say something that might put the evening back together before I went to sleep on it and let it calcify into something harder to address.
His study door stood half open at the end of the hallway, lamplight spilling out into the dark, and I heard voices inside as I approached, Luca’s, sharper than I’d heard it moments earlier in the kitchen, apparently having gone straight from our conversation to confront his brother directly.
“You keep putting Alessandra ahead of your wife,” Luca was saying. “Tonight, in front of the entire family, after everything else the last month. How long do you actually think Vivienne’s going to tolerate this?”
“Vivienne understands the situation.”
“You’re that sure?”
I stopped several feet from the door, my hand rising instinctively to knock and then hesitating, some instinct warning me to wait, to hear whatever came next before announcing myself.
There was a pause, long enough that I nearly stepped forward anyway. Then Dante’s voice again, lower now, tired in a way I recognized immediately, the exhaustion of a man defending a position he wasn’t entirely convinced of himself.
“Our marriage isn’t built on love,” he said. “It’s built on obligation. She understands that better than anyone.”
My hand stayed raised halfway to the door. I didn’t knock. Whatever context Dante might eventually offer, I had heard him call our marriage an obligation, and I could not make myself unheard it.
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Luca said, his voice rising, and I didn’t wait to hear whatever came after.
I turned and walked back down the hallway as quietly as I could manage, my legs carrying me forward on instinct rather than intention, my mind still turning over the five words that mattered more than anything Luca might say in response to them.
Obligation. Not love. Seven years, and in the moments when he believed no one who mattered was listening, that was the word he reached for.
I went upstairs and undressed alone, hanging the emerald dress back in the closet with slow, deliberate movements, my hands steadier than I expected them to be. I sat at the vanity wiping away the makeup I’d applied that afternoon with such careful hope. I couldn’t cry. Even anger felt distant.
Dante came up nearly an hour later, moving quietly, and found me lying on my side, facing away from his side of the bed, eyes open in the dark though he couldn’t have known that. He didn’t ask if I was awake. I think, somewhere underneath everything else, he already knew.
He didn’t say anything. He lay down beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him, and neither of us reached for the other, and that silence, stretching out between us in the dark, told me more clearly than anything Elena had said at dinner exactly how far apart we had already drifted.
* * *