Chapter 38
CASSIA
“Where are we going?”
Dante glances at me, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You’ll see.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
I settle back into the leather seat, watching New Orleans blur past the window. The French Quarter fades behind us, all neon and noise, giving way to quieter streets. Shotgun houses with sagging porches. Corner stores with metal grates. The parts of the city tourists don’t photograph.
His hand finds mine on the console. Warm. Sure. I thread my fingers through his and stop asking questions.
The night air is thick with humidity, the kind that makes your clothes stick and your hair curl. Somewhere nearby, a jazz trumpet wails from an open window. This city never sleeps. It just changes tempo.
We’ve been back from Italy for weeks. Four weeks of settling into a life that still feels unreal. Sunday dinners with his family. Morning coffee in the garden. Nights tangled together in sheets that smell like us.
I keep smoothing my thumb over the band on my ring finger. Pressing down. Making sure it’s real.
It always is.
The car slows outside a building on a corner I don’t recognize. Modern glass and clean lines. Warm lights glowing from within even at this hour.
Three security cameras above the entrance. A parking lot that could hold fifty cars, empty now except for a patrol vehicle making rounds. Landscaping trimmed tight against the foundation.
The sign above the entrance reads CASA LUCIA in elegant green letters, with a smaller line beneath: Community Health Center.
I know this place. Not this specific location, but what it represents. Giada told me about the centers months ago, back when I was still learning the shape of this family.
Salvatore Santoro built the first one for Lucia twenty-five years ago, when she told him she wanted to give back to the city that had given them everything. State-of-the-art facilities in neighborhoods that needed them most. Open eighteen hours a day, six days a week. Staffed by doctors who cared.
His gift to her. His love made tangible.
Giada runs them now. Has since she finished her residency. Four centers across the city, serving thousands of patients who would otherwise have nowhere to go.
“What are we doing here?”
Dante cuts the engine. “Come see, tesoro.”
The center is dark at this hour, but he has a key. Of course he has a key. He funds this place. Has funded it since his father died, keeping both their visions alive even when grief made it hard to remember why anything mattered.
Inside, the lights are dimmed but the space feels alive.
A waiting room with comfortable seating, a children’s play area in one corner.
Artwork on the walls, donated by local artists.
The faint scent of antiseptic softened by something warmer underneath.
Lavender, maybe. Something chosen on purpose.
He leads me down a hallway, past exam rooms with modern equipment, past a stocked pharmacy, past a break room where the night staff’s coffee cups sit waiting for the morning shift.
We stop outside an office at the end of the hall.
The door is open. Inside: a desk, empty bookshelves, a window overlooking the parking lot. There’s a nameplate on the desk, but it’s blank. Waiting.
Three shelves on the left wall, bare. Two filing cabinets. One desk, cleared and polished, the wood grain catching the hallway light.
“This is new,” Dante says. “We’re expanding. Two more centers over the next eighteen months. Gia’s been running everything on her own, but it’s too much. The medical side, the administrative side, the fundraising. She’s burning out.”
I nod, not understanding why he’s telling me this. Why we’re here, in this unfinished office, at nine o’clock at night.
“She needs help,” he continues. “Someone to handle the foundation side. The finances. The grants. The operational planning.” He turns to face me, his eyes searching mine. “Someone who understands numbers. Who can trace patterns. Who can build something sustainable.”
My hands grip the edge of the desk. I press hard enough to feel the wood bite into my palms.
“Someone like you, tesoro.”
My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Nothing comes out.
He pulls a folder from the desk drawer. Spreads the contents across the surface: financial projections, expansion plans, grant applications.
Five columns of projected revenue. Three tiers of grant funding. An eighteen-month capital expenditure timeline with quarterly benchmarks. My eyes move across the spreadsheet before I can stop them, tracing the logic, looking for the story the figures are telling.
“I want you to be the CFO of Casa Lucia,” he says.
I stare at him. The words land somewhere behind my sternum and stay there, heavy and strange.
“You saved my family with your mind, Cassia. You traced Romano’s theft when no one else could see it.
You found the patterns. You put together evidence that brought down a conspiracy thirty years in the making.
” His voice is steady. Certain. “Use that mind to help others. Build something that lasts longer than either of us.”
I look down at the papers. The columns blur.
“Gia handles the medicine. You handle everything else.” He moves closer, tilts my chin up so I have to look at him. “This is yours. If you want it.”
If I want it.
He’s not offering me jewelry. Not a vacation, not a car, not any of the things wealthy husbands give their wives to show affection.
He’s offering me work. A reason to get up in the morning that belongs to me alone.
My voice breaks on the first try. I swallow. Try again. “You want me to run your mother’s foundation?”
“I want you to run it with Gia. As partners. Sisters.” His thumb traces my jaw. “She’s already excited. Said she’s been drowning in spreadsheets for years and someone in this family can rescue her.”
A laugh escapes me, shaky at the edges. “She said that?”
“Word for word. I think her exact phrase was ‘thank God someone around here can do math.’”
My vision goes liquid. I blink and the tears slide down, hot against my skin. My throat locks. I can’t swallow around it, can’t breathe through it.
“Why?” I manage.
He looks at me like the question doesn’t make sense.
“Why what?”
“Why this? Why not.” I gesture at nothing. Diamonds. A yacht. Whatever rich men give their wives.
“Because I know you.” Simple. Certain. “I know you’d go crazy sitting around this house with nothing to do. I know you need to work, to contribute, to matter. And I know you’re brilliant at it.”
He cups my face in both hands.
“I’m not giving you something to fill your time. I’m giving you something to fill your life.”
The sound that tears out of me isn’t something I choose.
It rips loose from below my ribs, raw and graceless, and I press my face into his chest because my legs have stopped being reliable.
My hands fist his shirt. He holds me. Solid and patient.
His chin rests on the top of my head, and I shake against him until the worst of it passes.
I count my breaths. Four in. Hold. Four out. The numbers steady me the way they always have.
When I can breathe again, I pull back. Wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand. Look at the papers spread across the desk.
“I’ll need access to all the financial records. Going back at least five years.”
His lips twitch. “Naturally.”
“And I want to meet with your accountants. The family ones, too. I’m not separating the foundation from the rest of the business operations until I understand how it all connects.”
“Done.”
“And I need a real office. Not this one.” I look around at the bare shelves, the white walls. “Something at the compound. Where I can work properly.”
“Already arranged. Gia helped pick out the furniture.”
I stare at him. “You planned this.”
“Weeks ago.” He pulls me closer. “I wanted to wait until after you’d settled in. Until you knew this wasn’t just me trying to keep you busy.”
“It’s not?”
“Cassia.” His voice drops. “You’re the most capable person I’ve ever met. You walked into my house as a condolence bride and became essential within a month. Not because I needed a wife. Because you are extraordinary, bella.”
His forehead presses to mine. “I would be an idiot not to use that. And I would be a terrible husband not to give you a way to use it yourself.”
I kiss him.
It’s not gentle. I pour everything into it, and his hands grip my hips, pulling me flush against him, and my fingers dig into his collar and hold on like he might disappear.
He won’t. I know that now.
When we pull apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“I love you,” I say.
“I know.” He presses his lips to my forehead. “I love you too.”
We stand in the quiet office, surrounded by plans and projections. Outside, New Orleans hums its nighttime song. Inside, everything is still.
“We should go,” he says. “It’s late.”
“In a minute.”
I look around the room again. The blank nameplate. The waiting shelves. The window overlooking a parking lot that will be full tomorrow with people who need help.
Four centers. Six thousand patients a year. Two more on the way.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
His arm tightens around me.
“Tesoro. Thank me by making it something they’d both be proud of.”
Lucia and Salvatore. The mother-in-law I’ll never meet but whose presence I feel every time I sit at her table, love her son.
“I will,” I promise. “I will.”
We drive home through the dark streets, my hand in his.
He glances over. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m working.”
“We haven’t left the parking lot.”
“The five-year model has a gap in year three. The projected patient volume doesn’t account for the second location’s ramp-up period. And the grant applications need to be restructured. You’re leaving federal matching funds on the table.”
Silence.
I look at him.
He’s smiling. Not the sharp, dangerous smile he gives the rest of the world. The real one. The one that’s just for me.
I turn back to the window, but I’m not seeing the shotgun houses or the neon glow of the Quarter in the distance. I’m seeing columns. Revenue streams. A budget I’m going to tear apart and rebuild from the ground up.
My fingers tap against my thigh, keeping time with the numbers already running.