Epilogue
LENA
One Year Later
The villa sits at the top of a hill outside a town so small it doesn’t appear on most maps, surrounded by lemon groves and olive terraces and a sky that does something breathtaking in the late afternoon by turning a shade of gold that makes everything it touches look like a painting of itself.
We are, technically, on our honeymoon in Tuscany.
“You know this is technically our honeymoon,” I said to Dario on the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic.
“I’m aware,” he said, without looking up from whatever he was reading.
“A year after the wedding.”
“The situation required attention.”
“The situation always requires attention.”
He looked up then. “Are you complaining?”
I thought about it. “No. I’m noting it for the record.”
“Noted,” he said, and went back to reading.
The thing is, I’m not complaining. I made my peace with the delay at the time.
There are things I would have resented a year ago that I absorb differently now.
Not because I’ve become passive, but because I understand what he manages and why the timing mattered, and that understanding is the difference between acceptance and surrender.
I chose this. I keep choosing it.
Opal is at home with Alanda, who is not technically a nanny but is very much functioning as one this week.
I spoke to them yesterday afternoon—Opal was in the middle of something with Rainbow, the regular black cat, not the fancy one Dario thought she should have, who she considers perfect in every way—and that’s the last time I’ve called.
It’s been thirty-one hours. Not that I’m counting.
Not that each hour is its own form of torture.
The villa has thick stone walls and tile floors that stay cool even in the afternoon heat, and a terrace overlooking the lemon grove where we’ve been eating dinner every night.
The lemons are the size of softballs and smell like something that should probably be made into perfume.
The first evening, I stood in the grove and put my face against one and just breathed, which felt slightly insane and completely right.
“What are you doing?” Dario called, from the terrace.
“Smelling the lemon.”
A pause. “Alright.”
“You should try it.”
Another pause. Then footsteps on the path. He appeared beside me, looked at the lemon tree for a moment, and then pressed his nose against a lemon. “You’re right.”
“I know.”
He looked at me sideways.
“I’m keeping track,” I said. “The times I’m right. For the record.”
“You have a lot of records going.”
“I’m a data-driven person.”
He almost smiled. We stood there in the lemon grove in the early evening light until the bugs found us, which took longer than I expected.
On the second morning, I woke up before him and walked to the village alone. Something I haven’t been able to do in years—just walk, without Opal’s hand in mine, without the constant background accounting of a single parent who is always tracking a small person’s location and well-being.
Turns out, I’ve missed this.
I walked through the village market and bought figs and a bottle of something local, and I sat on a bench in the square for forty minutes watching the pigeons and the old men playing cards and the light moving on the old stone buildings.
It felt like the first time I’d exhaled since I was twenty.
When I came back, Dario was on the terrace with coffee and a book, and he looked up when he heard me on the path. “Good walk?”
“Perfect.”
“You were gone a while.”
“I sat in the square. For no reason. Just to sit there.”
He looked at me over his book with an expression I’ve learned means he’s recording something. “How was that?”
“I didn’t know how necessary it was until I was doing it.”
He nodded once, like that made complete sense, and handed me his coffee. I sat down beside him, and we looked at the lemon grove in the morning light and didn’t say anything else, which was also necessary, and also exactly right.
Tonight he cooked something elaborate—a visit to the village market this morning, two hours in the kitchen this afternoon while I sat on the terrace pretending to study my business coursework but mostly watching him through the window.
The food is extraordinary. Pasta and grilled fish, the lemons in three different applications, and a wine he selected with no hurry.
We eat slowly on the terrace in the way you can eat when there’s nowhere else to be and the evening is long and warm and the village lights are coming on in the valley below.
“This is so good,” I say, about the pasta.
“I know.”
“You’re not supposed to agree that readily when someone compliments your cooking. It’s not modest.”
“You do it.”
He’s got me there. “Yeah, okay, smart guy.”
“And the pasta is good. That’s just accurate.”
I laugh. He eats.
When the wine is mostly gone, and the sun has finished its particular business with the sky and the first stars are coming in, I put down my fork and look at him. “I want another baby.”
He doesn’t look surprised. He looks at me with the candle doing something warm to the lines of his face—the salt-and-pepper hair, the dark eyes that would be perfect in a little one’s face.
“I’ve been thinking about it seriously. Not just the idea—the actual thing. What it means, what it costs, what Opal would make of it.” I pause. “She’s already named it.”
“She’s named a hypothetical baby?”
“Neptune or Gerald, depending on the day.”
He considers this. “Neptune, I think. Gender neutral. And how does she know you want a baby?”
“She brought it up, actually. Having a sibling. And that got me thinking, and now here we are.”
“And what do you want?” he asks. Not the baby. What do I want overall? I hear the difference in his tone.
“I want our family to be bigger. I want Opal to have someone. I was an only child, and it was rough. I don’t want that for her. And more than all of that, I want a baby in our lives. I want to see you experience that miracle for yourself.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The candle moves in a small breeze from the valley. “I want that too.”
“Okay.”
We look at each other across the table in Tuscany. He says, “Making a baby can take time. Especially at my age.”
I look at him. “You’re not that old—”
The corner of his mouth moves. “We should probably start right now.”
“Now, now? As in here, now?”
“Yes.”
“We’re on a terrace. There are olive farmers in that valley.”
“It’s dark,” he says. “And they have their own problems.”
I look at the valley. I look at him. I look at the table, which is solid stone and has been here since approximately the Renaissance.
I sigh the sigh of a put-upon wife. “The things I do for family planning.”
“Your sacrifice is noted for the record,” he agrees, and reaches for me.
The table is, in fact, sturdy enough to take my full weight after he clears the dishes in one sweep of his arm. He sets me on the edge, lifts my dress over my knees, and decides that I am dessert.
The things he can do with his tongue still make my eyes roll back. I hope that never stops.
When his fingers slip into me, my whole body jolts. “Right there—”
“I know, pet. I know where all your spots are. Even in the dark.”
His fingertips charge my G-spot with every stroke, and he sucks my clit into his mouth, pulsing his lips on me there. My heels dig into his shoulders, but I don’t think he cares about anything else in the world right now.
“Sir, I’m so close—”
“Mm-hmm.” He doesn’t stop. He never stops unless I beg him to.
Sometimes, not even then.
The shock hits first, and then the heat, and the ecstasy, and I’m gasping his name, begging. For more or for less, I don’t know.
He stands, his fingers still in me until they’re replaced by his dick, inching inside of me. He’s halfway in when I hook my heels around his waist to pull him in deeper. “Naughty pet.”
“Don’t tease me tonight. I need my husband.”
He leans onto me. “Then you will have him.” His rhythm is exactly what I need as he rips the buttons open on the top of my dress and buries his face in my tits. He gathers them in his hands, biting, kissing, sucking as he pumps into me over and over.
Everything goes tight in my core again, only this time it’s harder. Bigger. “Oh, fuck—”
“As you wish.” He grabs my hips, pulls me to him, and bounces me on his cock as I erupt.
I cling to him, need to feel him against me. His hands fit under my ass to keep me there safely and to keep me bouncing on him. My legs tighten around him as another climax takes over. I can’t help it. He’s making me come again.
Between my choking breaths, I hear, “That’s it, baby. Just like that. You’re coming so pretty on my cock. Look at you, such a good girl.”
My head goes fuzzy from it, and I’m not on this planet again until he thickens up inside of me, and groans, “Fuck, baby, I love you,” right before he comes.
I come back to my body in moments. The evening air is warm on my skin.
Somewhere below in the village there is faint music, and the lemon grove smells extraordinary.
I think—not for the first time and not for the last—that whatever I thought my life was going to look like at twenty-one, it was not this.
This is so much better.
Afterward, we lie on the terrace looking up at a sky so full of stars it could almost pass for daylight. “Do you think that worked?”
“Too soon to know.” A pause. “We should probably try again tomorrow.”
“For thoroughness.”
“Exactly.”
I look at the sky. The Milky Way is faintly visible in the east, which I haven’t seen since a camping trip with my mother when I was nine, before everything got complicated. I point it out. He looks. We lie there looking at it without saying anything for a while.
Eventually, I say, “My mother would like it here.”
“Bring her.”
He means it. I’m still adjusting to the scale of that—not the money, the willingness. The fact that what I want is treated as a thing worth acting on, without my having to justify it.
“Next time.”
“Time for sleep,” he says. “The stars will be there in the morning.”
“They’re different stars in the morning.”
He looks at me.
“Opal told me.”
He laughs, and it’s the laugh I got almost none of in the first months and now have access to regularly. One of the things I get to keep.
“I haven’t called to check on Opal,” I say.
“She’s fine,” he says. “Alanda sent a picture this morning.”
I turn my head. “You’ve been getting updates.”
“Daily.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“You were enjoying not checking in,” he says. “I didn’t want to interrupt that.”
I stare at him. He looks at the stars, entirely unruffled. This is the man I married—who will secretly manage my peace of mind on my behalf and consider it a reasonable use of his time.
“Show me the picture.”
He shows me. Rainbow is asleep on Opal’s chest, taking up most of her torso. Opal looks deeply satisfied. The picture is excellent.
I close my eyes.
The stars will be there in the morning.
Different ones, but still.
“Yeah. Sleep.” Now that I know my baby’s okay, I can do that.
He stands and helps me off the table. “When we get to the bed, we should try again.”
“Race you there.”
He’s already inside the villa by the time I start to move.
I pat my belly. “You should get your cardio from your father. Mine sucks.”
“Are you coming in or what?” Dario hollers from inside.
“On my way.” I have no idea how I’ll keep up with two of them.
The End.