Chapter 5
EMILY
Pietro Benetti.
Everything about him suggested danger. The scowl. The intensity. The possessive streak he did very little to hide. On the surface, he was exactly the kind of man I knew better than to trust.
Except men like that were not usually the ones who did the most damage.
The truly dangerous ones tended to come smiling.
Charming. Easy. They made you feel chosen before they made you feel small, and by the time you realized what they were doing, they had already taught you to doubt your own version of events.
I dropped onto the bed and stared at the wall, my earlier excitement fading under the weight of that thought. A few minutes ago I was nervous in the ordinary, fluttery way. Now the feeling sat lower and heavier.
I closed my eyes as I felt the familiar burn of tears behind my eyelids.
Even three thousand miles away, Adam still had a way of ruining things.
I looked toward the pile of books on my desk and reconsidered my evening for what had to be the fiftieth time.
If I was honest, I began reconsidering it the moment I agreed and Pietro scribbled his number in the corner of my notebook in that blunt, sure way of his, like it had never crossed his mind that I might not use it.
We were supposed to meet at seven. I still had two hours. In that time, I managed to turn my wardrobe inside out, reject half my clothes, and change so many times that the rejected dresses now formed their own small, judgmental mountain across my chair.
The one I had on was fine. More than fine, probably. Soft blue, fitted at the waist, low enough at the neckline to feel a little daring without making me tug at it every ten seconds. Objectively, it looked good.
That did not stop me from seeing only flaws. The way it skimmed my hips. The softness of my stomach. The parts of me that had once received admiration and then, later, criticism sharp enough to carve themselves into memory.
I stood and walked to the mirror again, arms folding tightly over myself before I made myself stop.
This was ridiculous. It was one dinner. One public place.
One man I barely knew. So why did it feel like I was standing on the edge of something much bigger?
Pietro felt different. Different enough that my stomach still filled with butterflies even with all the doubt creeping in alongside them.
I turned away from the mirror before it could finish its work on me.
I had a chapter of my thesis arguing that the most corrosive power wasn't the kind that announced itself.
It didn't come in loud. It came in quietly, through the side door, wearing the face of devotion.
It made you feel chosen. Made you feel lucky.
Made the moment you finally tried to name it feel unreasonable, dramatic, prove you were always the problem.
Adam had been very good at that.
I had spent a long time being very good at believing him.
But I was Emily Hart now, not Emily Gallagher, and I was standing in a Boston apartment I found myself and paid for myself with a stipend I earned, and I was going to dinner with a man I had chosen, and I was going to wear this dress because it was a good dress and I looked good in it and those two facts did not require anyone else's permission.
I smoothed my hands down the front of it once, deliberate and final.
Then I went to fix my lipstick.
A knock landed against the half-open door before I could spiral any further.
“Emily?”
I turned too quickly. “Yeah?”
Nora leaned against the frame, took one look at the state of my room, and smiled with immediate understanding. “Well. This looks serious.”
“It’s not serious,” I replied a little too quickly, brushing my dress.
Her gaze drifted over the discarded clothes, then to the dress I was wearing, then back to my face. “Sure.”
I sat back down on the bed with a sigh. “I’m thinking of cancelling.”
Nora’s brows lifted. “Cancelling last minute? That’s unlike you.”
“It’s nothing important.”
“Based on the chaos in this room, I’m going to go ahead and disagree.” She leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms. “So who’s the lucky guy? Or girl. I’m not judging.”
“Why did you stop by?” I asked, before she could say anything too perceptive. “Do you need help grading? It’s fine, honestly. I can reschedule.”
Please say yes, I thought, looking at her with what had to be a fairly desperate expression.
But of course Nora noticed. She noticed everything.
Her smile softened, but she shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
“Nora—”
“No.” She tossed the cardigan back onto the bed. “I am not helping you sabotage yourself because you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Emily.”
I looked away.
She stepped into the room properly then, the teasing leaving her face. “Is this about this guy, or is it about someone else still being in your head?”
The question landed more accurately than I liked.
“That’s not fair,” I said quietly.
“No,” she said, just as quietly. “It isn’t. But neither is letting a bad experience dictate your present.”
Bad experience. That was one way of putting it.
We weren’t that close, not really. Friendly roommates did not automatically become confidantes, and even back when it was happening, most people around me did not know the extent of it.
Maybe because I was ashamed. Maybe because part of me still felt stupid for not naming it sooner.
It was easier, even now, to call it a relationship that went wrong.
But that was not what it was.
It was abuse.
I swallowed hard.
Nora looked at me for another moment, and this time when she smiled, it was pure affection. “And let whoever the lucky guy is miss you looking this fine in that dress? Absolutely not.”
I sighed with a shake of my head.
She turned brisk and practical again. “Okay, tell you what. I’ll give you an out. If you get uncomfortable, text me 911 and I’ll call you. Put me on speaker and I’ll go full crisis mode. Tears, panic, the whole thing. Medical emergency. Ludvik is dying.”
I blinked. “Your hamster?”
She looked offended. “My gerbil.”
Despite everything, I laughed. “That’s oddly specific.”
She shrugged. “I like to prepare for disasters.” She jerked her head toward me. “All right, where is this life-threatening date happening?”
I unlocked the screen and showed her the message.
She read it, then let out a low whistle. “Well.”
“What?”
“Your guy is either very lucky or very well connected.” She handed the phone back to me with raised brows. “There’s a six-month waiting list for that place.”
I stared at the name of the restaurant, Venezia, as if it might rearrange itself into something more casual. It didn’t.
“Oh.”
Nora grinned. “Oh, indeed.”
I tried to act as though this information did not rattle me, but it followed me all the way into the Uber.
I had not really let myself think too hard about Pietro’s situation before. Hawthorne in particular had no shortage of students who looked as though they had stepped out of a magazine spread about generational wealth and emotional repression.
But now, sitting in the back of the car with Nora’s words still fresh in my mind, I found myself replaying the details more carefully.
He was out of my league.
Not just financially. In every way that mattered. Too striking. Too intense. Too self-possessed. The kind of man who belonged in rooms where people made decisions that altered other people’s lives.
And I was me.
A PhD student with a teaching assistant stipend, a wardrobe made up mostly of sale rack selections and desperation, and enough emotional baggage to qualify as excess luggage on an international flight.
“Great,” I muttered under my breath. “That’s exactly the mindset I needed.”
The driver glanced at me briefly in the mirror, clearly deciding whether I was speaking to him, then wisely thought better of it.
By the time the car pulled to a stop outside the restaurant, I was wound tight enough that getting out felt less like arriving for dinner and more like stepping onto a stage.
I barely had time to smooth my dress before the door opened from the outside. A man in black with a deep red waistcoat offered me a polite smile and his hand.
“Miss Hart?”
I blinked. “Yes?”
“This way.”
The warmth hit me first as I stepped inside, followed by soft amber light and the low murmur of voices softened by distance, velvet, and money.
The whole place smelled faintly of wood polish, wine, and something buttery and expensive I probably couldn’t pronounce.
It was beautiful in a way that felt effortless, all rich dark tones and hidden corners, elegant without tipping into obvious showiness.
I became abruptly, painfully aware of myself. My dress. My shoes. The fact that I had nearly cancelled this less than an hour ago and was now standing in a restaurant that probably charged extra for breathing.
The host led me deeper into the room, past the busier front section and toward a quieter corner tucked away behind a carved wooden screen and a wall of greenery lit from below.
The table there was small and intimate, secluded enough to feel private without being hidden, and for one ridiculous second I thought, of course he would choose somewhere like this. Somewhere that felt protected.
Pietro rose the moment he saw me.
He was wearing black tailored jacket, open collar, dark hair combed back. For half a second all the words in my head vanished, leaving nothing but the simple, deeply inconvenient fact that he was unfairly beautiful.
And then I noticed the flowers.
Not a bouquet.
A small arrangement waiting at the table, gathered in a low glass vase. Roses, lilies, ranunculus, freesia, a few pale stems I didn’t know the name of, all artfully arranged as though someone had given up halfway through choosing and decided the safest answer was yes.
Pietro followed my gaze and, for the first time since I had met him, looked almost faintly uncomfortable.
“I wasn’t sure which flowers you’d like,” he said. “So I told them to send one of everything that looked respectable.”
I stared at him.