3. Ariah
— ? —
Ariah
The morning starts the way every morning has started for the past two weeks: Pietro’s side of the bed cold, the sound of his car long gone before the sun fully rises.
I lie there for a moment, my hand pressed flat against the sheets where he should be, feeling the absence of warmth.
There was a time when I would have reached for him in the dark, when he would have pulled me close and murmured something half-asleep against my hair. Now I wake to emptiness so often I’ve started sleeping on his side just to make the bed feel less vast.
“Mama?” Lucy’s voice comes from the doorway, small and uncertain. “Mama, Luca says there’s no more of the cereal with the honey.”
I sit up, pushing hair out of my face. “Then Luca can have the cereal with the chocolate.”
“He says he hates the chocolate now.”
“He loved the chocolate yesterday.”
“That was yesterday.” She says this with the weary patience of someone explaining basic facts to a particularly slow adult. “Today he hates it.”
I swing my legs out of bed and the floor is cold under my feet - marble, everywhere marble, because marble is what Grimaldis have always had and never mind that it’s freezing in winter. “Tell your brother I’ll be down in five minutes and he can explain his cereal opinions to me directly.”
Lucy disappears, small feet padding down the hallway, and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I reach for my robe. I look tired. Not dramatically exhausted, not the kind of tired that earns you sympathy - just worn, like a favorite sweater washed too many times.
The kind of tired that accumulates so slowly you don’t notice until you’re standing in your bedroom at six-thirty wondering when you started looking like this.
By the time I get downstairs, Luca has dramatically draped himself across his chair in protest of the chocolate cereal, and Lucy is eating her breakfast with pointed good behavior, shooting her brother looks that clearly say see how mature I’m being.
“The honey cereal is gone,” I tell Luca, pouring myself coffee. “You can have chocolate, you can have plain, or you can have toast. Choose.”
“I want the honey.”
“Then you’ll need to invent time travel, because you ate the last of it two days ago.”
He considers this seriously. “Can I have toast with honey?”
“Yes, Luca. You can have toast with honey.”
Crisis averted. Another morning victory in the endless war of attrition that is parenting four-year-olds.
I make his toast, cut it into the triangles he currently prefers over squares, and set it in front of him with a small bowl of honey for dipping, because letting him pour his own means a cleanup operation that lasts longer than breakfast.
“Where’s Papa?” Lucy asks, and my coffee turns bitter in my mouth.
“Working, baby. He has a lot to do right now.”
“He’s always working.”
“I know.”
“Matteo’s papa takes him to school sometimes.” She pokes at her cereal. “And Giulia’s papa picks her up.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to explain that their father loves them but somewhere along the way, he started giving the company more of his time - which amounts to the same thing as loving it more, when you’re four years old and the chair at the breakfast table is empty again.
“Your papa will be around more after the launch,” I say, hoping it’s not a lie. “Things will calm down.”
“You always say that.”
“I know, piccola. I know.”
* * *
Rosa arrives at eight, and I’ve never been more grateful for another adult. She takes one look at my face and makes that clicking sound with her tongue that Italian women of a certain age have perfected.
“You look terrible,” she says. “Are you sleeping?”
“Define sleeping.”
“Lying in a bed with your eyes closed for more than four hours.”
“Then no.”
She sighs, gathering the breakfast dishes. “The Signora called this morning. Something about the menu for a launch event next week. She wants your thoughts before the planning meeting.”
My stomach tightens. “Of course she does.”
“I can tell her you’re unwell.”
“That’ll make it worse. She’ll start asking questions, and probably send doctors and opinions and a priest.” I drain my coffee. “Did she mention Serena?”
Rosa’s expression tells me she knows exactly what I’m asking. “She didn’t say. But that woman has been everywhere with her lately. The Salerno one.”
“Serena.”
“That’s the one.” Rosa’s mouth thins. “Pretty face. Cold eyes.”
“You said that before.”
“It bears repeating. Some people, you only need to see once to know what they are.” She pauses, studying me. “The Signore was asking about you this morning. When he called about the scheduling.”
“Pietro called here?”
“To speak to the children. But he asked how you were, after. You specifically.”
I don’t know what to do with that information. He asked about me, but he didn’t ask me. He called the house, but not my phone. He’s thinking of me, maybe, in the margins of his overwhelming days - but the margins aren’t enough. The margins have never been enough.
“I have the planning meeting this afternoon,” I tell Rosa. “The one at the office. Pietro asked me to come, something about visual continuity.”
Rosa nods, her expression carefully neutral, and if she has opinions about me chasing crumbs of involvement in my own husband’s company - the company that used to be half mine, in a sense - she keeps them to herself.
* * *
The meeting is in the formal conference room, the one with the long mahogany table and Grimaldi ancestors glaring down from the walls. I recognize most of the faces - department heads, creative directors, the marketing team that’s been living and breathing this launch for months.
My eyes go immediately to the head of the table, where Pietro sits with Serena on his right and Rosaria on his left.
There’s no seat saved for me. I end up at the far end, between a junior assistant who won’t meet my eyes and a man from accounting whose name I can never remember.
Then the presentation starts, and I watch my ideas walk into the room on other people’s slides.
The color palette I suggested six months ago, during one of those late nights when Pietro and I actually talked.
The concept of craftsmanship as memory - the thing I said about how jewelry holds moments in metal, how a well-made piece becomes a vessel for the times it’s worn.
I said that to him in our kitchen, my hands wrapped around tea, and he’d looked at me like I’d given him something precious.
Now it’s bullet points on a screen. Talking points for Serena, who delivers them with smooth confidence, like the words were always hers.
“The emotional resonance is what sets this launch apart,” she says, and I watch Pietro nod along, watch him smile at her. “We’re not just selling jewelry. We’re selling legacy. Memory. The moments that matter.”
I bite the inside of my cheek so hard I taste copper.
She’s not wrong. The concepts are good - good because they’re mine, because I spent years building a brand on exactly this philosophy. But there’s no mention of where the ideas came from. No acknowledgment that the wife at the far end of the table might have contributed anything worth crediting.
The meeting ends and people mill around, and I watch Rosaria put her hand on Serena’s arm with genuine warmth, watch Pietro lean in to say something that makes Serena laugh, watch the three of them form a unit that has no space for me in it.
I leave without saying goodbye. No one notices.
* * *
By the time I pick up the twins from their playdate, my throat is starting to scratch and there’s a heaviness behind my eyes that I recognize as the beginning of a cold. Perfect. Exactly what I need.
“Mama, you sound funny,” Luca says from the backseat.
“Just a little tired, baby.”
“You should rest. When I’m tired, you make me rest.”
“That’s very good advice, Dr. Luca.”
“I’m not a doctor. I’m Luca.”
“Dr. Luca was a compliment.”
“Oh.” He considers this. “Then thank you. I accept your compliment.”
Lucy, pressed against her window, says nothing. She’s been quiet since I picked them up, that particular watchful quiet that means she’s processing something she’s not ready to talk about yet.
“You okay, piccola?”
“Fine,” she says, which is what I say when I’m not fine, and the echo of my own deflection in my four-year-old’s voice makes something ache deep in my chest.
The house is quiet when we get home, the way enormous houses always are.
Too much space for sound to fill, every footstep echoing. Rosa has left dinner prepped and a note saying she’ll be back tomorrow.
The twins run off to the playroom, already squabbling about whose turn it is to pick the first game, and I stand in the kitchen feeling the emptiness press in.
My throat hurts. My head is starting to pound. I should rest, should let myself be sick, but there’s no room for that. The twins need dinner and baths and bedtime, and tomorrow there’ll be another meeting I’m not really invited to, and the day after that, and the day after that.
I open the calendar on my phone, scrolling through the days ahead.
Our anniversary. Five days away.
Six years of marriage. Six years of learning to love a man I barely knew, of building a life in a country that wasn’t mine, of giving up pieces of myself hoping what I got in return would be worth it.
Six years, and I can’t remember the last time we celebrated.
But this year will be different. It has to be.
I’ll cook the dinner myself - his favorite, the pasta his grandmother taught me.
Rosa stood with me in this kitchen while I practiced the steps, patient with my mistakes and generous with her knowledge.
I’ll open the Marchetti wine we’ve been saving, the bottle his father put aside before he died.
I’ll put the children to bed early and light candles and wait for him.
This one night - this one night out of all the nights he’s been gone - he’ll come home.
I pull out my phone and start a list. Ingredients for the pasta. Fresh bread from the bakery near the bay. Flowers for the table - something simple, nothing his mother would choose. The good linens, the ones we never use because there’s never an occasion.
Five days. Five days to plan the perfect anniversary dinner.
“Mama?” Lucy appears in the doorway, thumb in her mouth, watching me with those too-knowing eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Planning something special,” I tell her. “For Papa. A surprise.”
“Will he come?”
The question lands like a stone in water. Will he come. My four-year-old daughter, asking if her father will show up for his own anniversary.
“Yes,” I say, with a certainty I don’t feel. “He’ll come. I’m going to make sure of it.”
She doesn’t look convinced, but she lets me pull her into a hug, lets me breathe in the little-kid smell of her hair, lets me hold on a moment longer than necessary.
I’m going to cook that dinner. I’m going to set that table. I’m going to prove - to him, to myself, to this house that’s never felt like mine - that we’re still worth fighting for.
He’ll come.
He has to.