Chapter 15 Vasso
VASSO
We don’t speak in the corridor. Old stone swallows sound, and the walk back to our suite feels like moving through a throat that hasn’t decided if it wants to spit us out or swallow us whole. I hold the door for her, close it softly, and the quiet that follows has edges.
Naomi sets her heels beside the chaise with surgical care, as if neatness could anesthetize. “Just for the record,” she says, “I didn’t bring up Harrison. Vecchio did. To throw spanners into the works, I expect?”
“Of course,” I say, rolling one cuff with the kind of precision that keeps my hands from doing something else. “He enjoys seeing what rattles and what sings.”
My jaw can crush diamonds. I feel it in the hinge when I answer questions I didn’t ask, when the past is pulled out like a rug and I’m supposed to applaud the dust pattern.
“You said you and Harrison don’t talk. That’s what all the files said when I did my diligence.” I hold her gaze. “So, tell me straight. Do you still talk to your father?” I bite out.
She goes still. “Not often. Sometimes. But not if I can help it.”
“Not often is not never.”
“No.”
It lands like a betrayal I have no right claiming, and I claim it anyway. In the very short time we’ve been married, some stupid, ancient part of me has decided mine is a verb with teeth. Absurd. Predictable. Exactly like me where she’s concerned.
“And when you can’t help it?” I press, because it matters, because it always has, because the shape of him is made of things I don’t know and want to.
“Then I am courteous. Then I remember that forgiveness isn’t a trophy I owe anyone. Then I get off the phone.”
I roll the other cuff. She watches the tendons in my wrist like the truth is hiding there. Maybe it is. I look back at her and something sharp and private flickers inside me. It’s possession, yes, and the knowledge I have no business being offended and am anyway.
“Useful,” I say, silk over steel. “To know.”
Her chin tips, heat flashing. “Useful? What am I, a spreadsheet?”
“You’re my wife,” I hear myself say, too fast. It hits us both like a dropped glass—loud, messy, undeniably real.
We stand in the wisteria light and stare each other down with ten years between us, each waiting to see who reaches first. She doesn’t posture or perform.
She says, calm and lethal, “You’re angry that he was brought up.
I can tell. But…I never knew what really happened between your father and mine. ”
For a second I think she’s joking. Then I see the clean bewilderment in her face and it takes air out of my lungs like a fist. “You never bothered to find out?” The worst version of me snipes before the best can tackle him. “What? Too busy being engaged to Leo Goldstein at the country club?”
She flinches. I taste regret, copper and instant. I deserve the look she gives me, and I take it.
“Are you going to tell me?” she asks. “Or do I need to go back in time and ask the girl who didn’t know better to beg harder?”
I pace. One minute. Two. Old stone, new rage. When I finally turn back, the mask stays where I dropped it.
“He came to my father with a smile,” I say. “Said the right words about opportunity. Offered him a low marketing job he’d cobbled together the night before. Turned out it was because he needed a signature he could copy later and a patsy to take the fall.”
Her small gasp is horror-filled. And I’m at once furious and forgiving that she kept far away from her own father and never bothered to find out how he decimated mine.
“Your father embezzled money from his own company, and when my father queried it, Harrison blew him off, then forged his name anyway, made him the fall guy. When the authorities came, your father handed mine over on a plate.” I breathe through the muscle in my jaw.
“I didn’t…I was,” she pauses, squeezes her eyes shut. “I was in Copenhagen.”
“I’m aware.”
“I tried to reach you but I didn’t have your number. So I wrote to you,” I add, softer, the part I don’t tell rooms. “Two letters. Hand-delivered to the club two weeks after your engagement party. A whole six years later I found out the country club manager tossed them before they reached you.”
Tears sheen her eyes and she shakes her head, but she doesn’t speak. So the words keep pouring out of me.
“We’d been thrown off Kane’s Reach by then.
My mother sold every valuable thing we owned to hire a lawyer.
But Harrison called his fixer. The forgery became ‘a misunderstanding.’ The misunderstanding became ‘a breach.’ My father went to prison.
We lost our apartment. My mother scrubbed more floors in strangers’ houses.
I learned which doors I wasn’t allowed to use by how fast someone shut them in my face. ”
Her mouth opens, closes. “I—”
Her hand flies to her mouth. “I didn’t know any of it, then or now. I swear I didn’t know. When I went back for the holidays, you were gone.”
Did you even look for me?
I swallow the words with a shrug. “Maybe you didn’t.” I won’t sand it for her. “Maybe you didn’t want to. Maybe Europe was convenient because distance launders what you don’t want under your nails.”
“That’s not fair, Vasso.”
“Fair?” I laugh once, without humor. “Fair is your grandfather being kind to my mother when her hands cracked from lye. Fair is not you kissing me like a miracle and then being told to marry a man with a better press kit. But both happened.” The laugh dies; the grief doesn’t.
“Fair would’ve been a goodbye that wasn’t treated like a stain. ”
She’s crying now and I hate it and I love that she isn’t hiding it. She crosses the room and lays her palm on my jaw. I don’t flinch and I don’t pull her in. I let her touch what I keep armored, even though it’s cracking.
“I think I understand you a little better now,” she whispers.
“What do you mean?”
“How you must hate me.”
The crack intensifies, threatening to expose emotions I need to keep under lock and key before they betray me. Again. “I feel a lot of things toward you,” he says, voice low, voice raw, “but I assure you, hate isn’t one of them, agapita.”
She gasps at that word…my endearment for her, blurted unbidden, makes her gasp even as it punches the air out of my lungs. The word drags a decade through the room and I hear a Rhode Island summer, bouncing on greenhouse glass, the taste of stealing from a future we thought we were owed.
I kiss her.
It isn’t a punishment or a prize won. It’s an admission stamped on her tongue.
I kiss like a man who’s been waiting to be believed.
She goes up on her toes and answers with everything she didn’t say in a driveway and everything she just said in a room where we stopped lying to each other.
My hands bracket her face, then her hips; her fingers curl in my shirt like she’s taking sides and I’m the only one that exists.
###
Naomi
When we break, it’s only because breath is finite. He rests his forehead against mine and I can feel the small tremor in his exhale, the one that says there was something under that story he didn’t know how to put down until I made a place for it.
“Thank you,” he says, barely a sound, but the power of it moves through me, shaking me anew.
“For what?” My voice is shredded silk.
“For listening,” he says. “For not minimizing it or telling me it was a misunderstanding.”
I huff a broken laugh. “I can hate what my father did and still… remember being a girl who wanted her family to remain whole.” The admission tastes metallic. “But I’m sorry I kept doors cracked I should have slammed.”
He swallows, jaw easing under my palm. “Just say the word, baby, and I’ll stand by you while we slam them together.”
Something unclenches in me I didn’t know I was strangling. I nod, against his mouth, against his breath, and then I kiss him again because some conversations deserve punctuation in a language older than English.
Then we stand there and kiss until the marrow of the argument warms, until my tears dry on his cheek, until the room remembers it is not a courtroom but a beautiful place where beautiful things are allowed to happen to people who have done the work to deserve them.
When we crawl into bed it is with our legs tangled and our hands stubborn, and when I drift, it is with the bass line softer and the next day already stepping into the wings with truffle dogs and markets and cameras and a woman who is learning how to revisit the past without the fear of agony waiting in the wings.
Morning arrives on padded feet: pale sun, a breeze that smells like thyme, a knock that turns out to be breakfast on a tray—strong coffee, eggs soft as clouds, a dish of peaches that taste like the color blush.
We eat on the loggia with our ankles brushing, and even though we don’t talk about Harrison or prisons or letters, the conversation sits between us like a cat that’s decided to be affectionate on its own terms.
The truffle hunt is a small circus.
Biscotto and Regina zigzagging like furry missiles, a handler who speaks to them in Tuscan that sounds like gossip, Vecchio in a cap he pretends isn’t adorable, Lulu in wedges that sink into soil while she insists the dogs “understand her aura.” Vasso’s hand finds the small of my back as we duck under low limbs; I steal his scarf and knot it in my hair; Nonna Rosaria appears out of nowhere to thrust a warm focaccia square at me with a grunt that translates to eat, you look too happy to sustain it on air.
We find a truffle the size of a toddler’s fist—Regina’s, of course; Biscotto sulks until he is bribed with salami from Lulu’s Mary Poppins purse—and Vecchio insists on christening it Matrimonio.
“Because you lock it up and hope it gets better in the dark,” he cackles, and Nonna smacks him with a tea towel.
By afternoon the market in Montalcino is a painting, with scarves and tomatoes, old women haggling like it’s aerobic exercise, a man who sells knives and poems.
Vasso buys me a straw hat I pretend to resist and then wear like I was born for this exact time and place.
We perform besotted with an indecency that would make the tabloids yawn if they didn’t have such good light to shoot us in, and when a “friend with a Leica” happens to catch us laughing over a shared gelato, I let him tuck my hair behind my ear; I lean into his shoulder like it belongs to me.
It’s almost easy…until a reporter with a mic and too much nerve cuts in, “Naomi, about the scandal that led to Mr. Dillinger’s father’s serving prison time, what did you know, and when did you know it?”
I feel Vasso go still. And I don’t smile when I reply. “That’s nobody’s business but ours.”
Undaunted, he pivots to Vasso. “And tell us, having acquired Kane Holdings and everything that comes with it—does vendetta feel good?”
Vasso doesn’t miss a beat. He pulls me closer and brushes a kiss on my temple. “Wedded bliss with this woman feels much much better.”
I look into the lens and say, calm as a lake, “We know exactly what we’re building. And we’re doing it together.”
He looks at me like he’s never seen me before and also exactly like he did when he first did, which is a neat trick and a dangerous one. The question hangs in the air, moves as the dogs bark and Chef Nonna swears at someone about bruising tomatoes.
“Now do everyone a favor and fuck off and leave us to enjoy our honeymoon.”
A smattering of laughter follows, but no one doubts that Vasso Dillinger doesn’t mean his dismissal.
Still staring into his eyes, I lace our fingers because the world is watching…and because I want to. He squeezes back and my heart trips over its own feet.
The bass line we’ve been dragging lowers a register and a melody threads over it—cleaner, louder.
We keep moving.
Lulu announces she’ll wear heels for the truffle dogs because they “like height.” Vecchio buys a knife and a poem and tells the poet the knife is sharper.
On the way back to the villa, Vasso coaxes a vintage Vespa through the lanes like he was born doing it—one hand easy on the bars, the other on my thigh, his shoulders relaxed and speed just shy of reckless.
I wrap my arms around his waist, tuck my cheek to his back, and wish the road would refuse to end. He’s warm, sun-soaked, smelling of thyme and engine and something that’s just him, and for a few stolen bends I let myself hold on like I never have to let go.
We crest the drive as the villa throws long shadows across old stone.
I tip my face up beneath the brim of my straw hat, eyes steady. “We know what we’re building,” I say, softer now, for him. For us.
He brushes his knuckles over my cheek, then leans in to kiss my lips. “Together,” he answers, and this time it isn’t propaganda at all.
The bass line is still there.
But for the first time, the melody is louder.
And by the time the lanterns blink on, Vecchio has all but agreed to the exchange, the lighthouse, the casks. Hands shaken brusquely and glances traded, the kind of yes that just needs a signature and a good headline.
Tuscany, it turns out, has been good to the Dillinger Agenda.
But…next is Greece and Vasso’s mother.
The woman who once kept a house my dysfunctional family stained and who, for several years of my life, felt like a surrogate whose value I took for granted until I was gone.
Until my father shattered her.
As the SUVs sweep onto the tarmac, I smooth my skirt, square my shoulders, and pray I make it through the visit with my dignity intact, and my heart still beating where it belongs.