Chapter 27
EMILY
Pietro had an uncanny ability to keep me up at night, whether it was with his hands or his words, and I had to admit I preferred the first method. It was far more satisfying and considerably less devastating.
The problem was that he had been right about one thing, or at least close enough to it that I couldn’t ignore it.
I still loved him. I had invested myself in ways I had not even realized until he ended us, and now, no matter how much I wanted to believe in him again, part of me was terrified of stepping further in only to watch him retreat the second life became difficult.
And now the choice was mine.
He would be waiting for a gesture tonight.
Apparently my body decided that was not information it was willing to process with dignity, because when I finally drifted off, it felt as though I had been asleep for all of a minute before an insistent knock started at my door.
I opened one eye, saw that it was barely seven in the morning, and decided that whoever was on the other side deserved me at my absolute worst.
I ignored it.
Then it came again.
With a level of resentment usually reserved for tax bills and group projects, I dragged myself out of bed and shuffled to the door looking, I imagined, like death after a difficult evening.
I opened it and nearly fell flat on my face.
Lily stood there smiling with apologetic warmth that made it difficult to slam the door on her, and beside her was another woman, just as beautiful in a different way, both of them looking faintly sheepish and entirely too awake for the hour.
“Sorry for the early wake-up,” Lily said, lifting a tray of drinks. “We come bearing gifts.”
The other woman raised a bag that smelled so richly of butter and sugar that my soul almost left my body.
I grunted.
At that hour, and on that little sleep, it was the full extent of my conversational range.
“You wouldn’t leave a pregnant woman standing in a hallway, would you?” the other woman asked, rubbing one hand over the curve of her stomach.
And just like that, I knew who she was before she even introduced herself.
“I’m Violet, by the way,” she said. “Violet Nishimura. I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet in Seattle.”
I grunted again, which really was not doing much for my image as an intelligent, articulate adult, but I stepped aside all the same and let them in.
The two of them moved through my kitchen with such ease that I could only sit there and watch, half convinced my brain was still asleep and had simply produced this highly specific domestic hallucination.
Lily found mugs, Violet located plates, someone turned on the kettle, and within seconds my tiny apartment had been taken over.
Why were they here?
Why were they both here?
And perhaps more importantly, had I put on underwear before going to bed?
I discreetly tugged at the hem of my nightshirt just in case and tried to look less like a woman who was a mess before breakfast.
Within what felt like no time at all, I had a cup of coffee pressed into one hand and a plate balancing a croissant and an aggressively decadent chocolate twist on my lap.
I looked up at them and blinked. They sat opposite me on the sofa, both of them far too serene for women who had staged an intervention before sunrise.
“I feel like this is a setup,” I managed at last, before taking a sip of coffee that made the caffeine gods sing directly into my bloodstream.
“It isn’t,” Lily said at once.
But Violet tilted her head to the side. “Well. It kind of is. And I’ll tell you this much, that boy must have reached a truly catastrophic level of desperation to ask us for help.”
Lily nudged her with an exasperated look. “Don’t say it like that. He loves her, that’s all.”
Right. So I would have to kill Pietro for this. Noted.
I took another sip of coffee and decided not to argue, mostly because the pastry looked excellent and I didn’t want to risk being left alone with my principles and no croissant.
Lily said to me more gently, “it’s just that Pietro made a mistake.”
“A big one,” I added.
She grimaced. “Yes. A very big one. And I’m not here to plead his case.”
Violet snorted. “No. He’s an idiot. He can deal with that himself.”
I liked Violet Nishimura.
“But,” she continued, reaching for a pastry with the calm assurance of a woman entirely at home in other people’s kitchens, “truth be told, we both married imbeciles.” She jerked a thumb toward Lily.
“By the way, in case you weren’t aware, her imbecile husband is my brother, which means I am related to two imbeciles.
Three, actually, if you count my nephew. It seems to be a strong family trait.”
Lily gave her a look over the rim of her mug. “You do realize you’re also part of that family.”
“Yes,” Violet said. “Which only proves I’m very generous.”
Against my better judgment, my mouth twitched.
Lily noticed immediately and smiled in that soft, maddeningly perceptive way of hers. “That’s better.”
“Don’t get too excited,” I said. “You’re still here suspiciously early with carbohydrates and caffeine.”
“Fair,” Violet said. “But for the record, the pastries were my idea. Lily was going to lead with warmth and maternal wisdom, which is all very lovely but less effective before caffeine.”
“I hate how right that is,” Lily muttered.
Violet took a pleased bite of pain au chocolat. “I know.”
Lily looked back at me. “We didn’t come to tell you to forgive him.”
“God, no,” Violet added at once. “Let him suffer a little longer.”
“That’s unkind,” I said and smiled into my coffee. “I love it.”
Lily’s mouth softened. “We’re here because, in different ways and to different degrees, we’ve been where you are.”
The look she gave Violet told me, without either of them saying outright, that Violet had endured the worse version of that road.
Violet sighed and set her cup down more carefully than before.
“What I’m about to say is not a defense of Pietro,” she said.
“He was an idiot. We’ve covered that. But men like ours have a remarkable talent for mistaking fear for righteousness.
They do what they think is right and then stand there looking tragic when the damage lands exactly where anyone with half a brain could have predicted. ”
“That is a very specific description,” I murmured.
“I know,” she said dryly. “Experience.”
She leaned back slightly, one hand drifting to her stomach in that absent, protective gesture I had already noticed.
"Hoka hurt me very deeply once," she said, and the room seemed to settle around the words. "Not in a way that could be fixed with flowers and groveling. He hurt me so badly that for a while just looking at him made me physically sick."
I went still.
Lily said nothing. She only watched Violet with the quiet attentiveness of someone who already knew every part of this story and still hated what it had cost her.
Violet's fingers tightened around her mug.
"He did what he thought was right. They always do.
It wasn't cruelty for cruelty's sake. It was arrogance and fear and love twisted into something ugly enough to leave scars anyway.
" She looked down for a moment. "And I lost everything. Including our baby."
My breath caught.
"It wasn't easy to come back from," she said quietly, when she looked up again.
"It took time. It took him understanding that loving me was not the same thing as deciding for me.
And it took me seeing, over and over again, that he meant to spend the rest of his life earning back what he had damaged.
There was a moment later when he took a bullet for me, and I realized that a life without him would hurt more than a life with him ever could. "
Her hand moved to her stomach.
"We've been together fourteen years. This world is not kind, and I would never romanticize what loving a man built for it costs you. But Hoka kept his promise. I am happy, Emily. Genuinely. And I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am his whole world."
She looked at me steadily.
The room went quiet after that, and I sat there holding my coffee in both hands, trying very hard not to let the words get under my skin.
“And they do learn,” Lily offered more softly. She reached for Violet’s hand, and Violet squeezed back at once before Lily looked at me again. “Truly. And usually faster than they’d like us to know, because then they’d have to admit they were wrong.”
That earned the smallest ghost of a smile from Violet.
“Alessandro made mistakes too,” Lily continued.
“Big ones. He wanted, for a while, to believe he could have everything without truly paying for it, then life taught him otherwise.” She paused, choosing her words carefully.
“When I met Pietro, he was twelve. He had never really known a mother's love.
" She paused, and something in her face went quieter.
"We showed him what love looked like when it worked.
We didn't show him often enough how many times it had to be rebuilt to get there. That's on us.”
I looked down into my coffee.
“But they do learn,” Lily said again.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “That sounds dangerously close to pleading his case.”
“Maybe a little,” Violet said. “But only because we are annoyingly invested now.”
“You should be apprehensive,” Lily added before I could answer. “In fact, if you weren’t, I’d be more concerned.”
I looked up.
She smiled gently. “You’d have to be a little unwell not to be cautious after all this. Love doesn’t erase hurt. Understanding doesn’t cancel fear. Of course you want to protect yourself now. That’s not weakness, Emily. That’s sense.”
Violet nodded. “Honestly, if you had melted just because he looked tragic, I would have liked you less.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Good to know I’m passing some kind of mafia family assessment.”
“Oh, you passed that ages ago,” Violet said.
“Violet,” Lily murmured.