Chapter 9 Vasso
VASSO
Two days. That’s all I manage to give her in the end.
I wrestle my willpower down from four and lose in forty-eight hours, and even now I can’t stop myself from checking my phone like a teenager waiting for a breadcrumb.
One glance. Then another. The screen stays black, and I hate myself for the dip in my stomach every time it lights up and it isn’t her.
I tell myself I’m monitoring logistics—pilot schedules, security rotations, preservation chatter, the private fund’s mood—but the truth is simple and ridiculous.
I miss her.
The house sounds wrong without the echo of her footsteps, the doorways feel too wide without her shoulder brushing the frame, the balcony air is colder without a woman who turns salt into electricity just by standing in it.
She went to see Theodore two mornings ago, kissed my cheek like a staged photograph, and I’ve been walking around this place like a man who misplaced his reasons.
I didn’t plan the honeymoon.
It fell out of my mouth at breakfast like a provocation and I didn’t pull it back because the image hit me too hard.
Naomi stretched on the foredeck of my yacht, the Aegean throwing diamonds at her skin while the world watches and pretends it’s the boat it envies.
It turns more than my ego on. And the octogenarian who runs the private fund is a creature of theater; two days on the water, and a weekend in his vineyard outside Montalcino will give him all the “stability optics” he craves, right down to a photograph of us tasting Brunello while he mutters about hope springing eternal with wife number seven at his elbow.
Before we sail, I want something rooted here. Something that cements my ownership of this rock in a way contracts can’t. Paper is leverage; memory is law.
I want Naomi to feel Dillinger Island under her feet and know it’s mine—and that she is, for now, too.
The study smells like cedar and old maps.
Evening tints the bay iron blue; the lighthouse turns its patient eye, a pulse I learned to count by in a life that didn’t belong to me.
I rest my phone on the blotter and don’t touch it for a full minute, which is the kind of discipline I pretend comes naturally. Then I give up the pretense and call.
She answers on the second ring, breath a little quick, road noise low behind her. “Vasso.”
“I’m calling to ask why the house is quiet,” I say, because the alternative is something I don’t say into phones.
“I’m on my way back,” she answers. “Felix insisted I take the SUV. We hit traffic near Wickford, but we’re clear now.”
“How long.”
“Two hours,” she says, amused. “And before you ask, yes, I ate. Yes, Grandpa is good—better than yesterday. He beat me at chess and then fell asleep in his chair pretending he hadn’t. How are you?”
Honest answer is better, now.
Instead, I lean back and let the chair complain. “Managing the usual.”
We trade a few neutral lines—weather, board whispers, a rumor about the trust chair’s pet project—like two diplomats who haven’t decided whether to be allies or occupy each other. Then she says it, light and deadly.
“You almost sound like you’ve missed me.”
I let the silence stand just long enough to be felt. The study is very quiet. The lighthouse blinks. “And if I have?”
On the other end, nothing for a heartbeat, and then the smallest hitch in her breath, the kind a microphone wouldn’t catch.
Satisfaction slides under my skin like good liquor.
“Then,” she says carefully, “I suppose you can tell me about it when I get home.”
“Good,” I say, and let a smile into the word because she’ll hear it even if she pretends not to. “Hurry home, wife. I have a surprise for you.”
She hates surprises. I know this because I cataloged her preferences the way other men memorize closing prices. “What kind of surprise?”
“If I tell you, it ceases to be one.”
“You’re wicked,” she says, and the warmth in it is not feigned. “You know I hate the suspense.”
“That’s exactly why I did it.”
She laughs low, unwilling and real, and I feel it in my chest like an old song I refuse to admit I still like. “You’re impossible.”
“And you’re late.”
“Two hours,” she repeats, smiling into the words. “Try not to start without me.”
The line clicks. The room breathes again.
I pick up the house phone and give the first set of instructions—Felix to ready the south lawn and the path to the cove, security to the outer perimeter, Marina to confirm the florist delivery and the lanterns, kitchen to hold the champagne at forty-five and send the oysters down five minutes after we arrive.
I ask maintenance for the lighthouse access keys, because signatures may have given me the deed but there are doors on this island I intend to open in person.
I hang up, stand, and cross to the wall safe behind the framed navigation chart. The combination turns under my fingers, a sequence I could dial in my sleep because I’ve practiced it as if speed could ever replace certainty.
The door swings, whispers against the jamb. Inside are deeds, flash drives, a stack of photographs I only look at when I want to be unproductive.
And a small box, matte black, heavy for its size.
I take it out and set it on the desk, thumb resting on the lid as if it might bolt.
Two hours, I tell myself. Enough time to make the island remember its owner.
Enough time to make her remember, too.
I pocket the box and let the safe close, the tumblers purring into place like a satisfied cat.
Then I turn to the window and watch the water until the house calls to tell me Naomi’s car has turned up the drive.
Vasso
Felix does as instructed.
He meets her at the front door with that unflappable calm of his, takes her coat, asks after the drive, and leads her, no detours, through the gallery, past the terrace, down the old service corridor that smells faintly of wet earth after rain.
I follow at a distance, long enough to watch the moment it hits her.
The greenhouse.
Refurbished glass panes glow in the dusk like a lantern on the lawn. We replaced every warped frame and shattered panel, rewired heat and irrigation, polished the brass until it remembered it was allowed to shine.
Inside, the air is warm and fragrant with jasmine climbing the back wall, tubs of heirloom roses she used to fuss over, clay pots of foxglove and sweet pea, basil and mint in a tidy kitchen row because she always said food tastes better when you bruise the leaves yourself.
And on the old worktable, the long plank of weathered oak where two foolish people once learned how impossible forever is, there’s white linen, low candles, crystal that throws constellations on the glass, and a meal that smells like butter and memory.
Naomi stops in the doorway like she’s walked into a story she didn’t dare hope someone kept. Her hand lifts to her throat; her mouth parts.
I feel the reaction before she says a word, and something loosens between my ribs and tightens in the same breath.
“Vasso,” she says, and it isn’t a challenge or a defense, just my name like it belongs somewhere soft.
I step forward, take in the way candlelight loves her skin, and pull the small matte box from my pocket. The lid gives with a hush.
She inhales.
It’s a rivière necklace with slender platinum with east–west emerald-cut diamonds stepping around her collarbone, the center stone a twin to her ring, knife-edge set with a hidden halo so the light has something to do besides fall.
It’s clean, unapologetic, and it belongs on her.
“Turn,” I say.
She does, wordless. I lift her hair, catch the faint vanilla and citrus in it, and clasp the chain at the nape of her neck. When my fingertips skim her skin, she shivers. The stones settle against her, a river of ice and fire.
“It matches,” she whispers, looking down at the way the center stone echoes the one on her finger.
“It was made to.”
Her eyes gloss. “It’s—” She stops, shakes her head, laughs once like she can’t believe the sentence she’s in. “It’s too much.”
“Nothing about you is ‘too much,’” I say, and I don’t mean diamonds.
For a second, she’s close enough to pull into my chest and forget the table exists. Instead, I offer my arm. She takes it. We sit.
We eat. She tells me Theodore was bright today, that he scolded a nurse for moving his books and then fell asleep mid-lecture like a man who hadn’t done that in too long.
She tried a new tea the cardiologist swears by; she hates it; he pretends not to. I let her talk because I like the way her face moves when it’s lit from the inside.
Somewhere between the oysters and the halibut she mentions Harrison, one sentence, light as a thrown pebble—He called the house again; I let it ring out.
My fork stills before I can order it otherwise. The greenhouse holds its breath as the old anger rises, disciplined, familiar. She sees it.
Her eyes widen a fraction and she steers—clever woman—away from the reef.
“Grandpa wants to see the roses next week,” she says briskly, touching one petal with that reverence the world keeps mistaking for fragility. “I told him they’ll be ready to brag.”
I’m absurdly touched by the pivot, by the fact that she doesn’t want to salt the night with a man who’s taken enough from both of us. I nod, let the grip on my fork ease, and pour more wine.
Dessert arrives, her favorite—dark chocolate layered with something sinful and a whisper of orange as music spills from nowhere and everywhere at once—low strings, brushed percussion, a rhythm that remembers our feet. The staff ghosts away and the greenhouse is ours.
I take a spoonful, hold it toward her. “Open.”
She should roll her eyes.
She opens instead. I watch her mouth close over the silver, watch her pupils darken, watch a thousand committee rooms and cameras fall away.
When she swallows, I feel it like a hand around my throat.
“Come,” I say, standing, offering my hand.