4. Ariah
— ? —
Ariah
Three days before our anniversary, Pietro comes home before midnight.
I’m in the kitchen when I hear his key in the lock, standing at the island with a cup of tea gone cold in my hands, and for a moment I don’t quite believe the sound. It’s barely ten o’clock. The twins have been asleep for two hours.
The house is so quiet I can hear the tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer, the one Rosaria insisted on keeping even though it chimes at three in the morning and wakes Lucy every single time.
“Ariah?”
His voice finds me before he does, and something in my chest loosens at the sound of it - my name in his mouth, the particular way he says the vowels, half-Italian and half-something else, the accent he picked up from years of international business softening the edges.
“Kitchen,” I call back.
He appears in the doorway, and he looks exhausted.
Not the normal tired of long days, but something deeper, something that’s settled into his bones over weeks and months of running himself into the ground.
His tie is already loosened, top button undone, and his jacket is slung over his arm like he couldn’t wait another second to get it off his body.
“You’re still up,” he says.
“Couldn’t sleep.” I gesture to the tea. “Thought this might help.”
He crosses the room and leans against the counter beside me, close enough that I can smell his cologne mixed with the particular scent of him underneath - something warm and familiar that still, after six years, makes me want to lean in.
I don’t, though. I’ve learned not to reach for things that might not reach back.
“The meeting ran long,” he says, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “But I wanted to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“The centerpiece of the launch. The concept we’re building the whole campaign around.
” He looks at me, and there’s something in his expression I haven’t seen in months - attention, actual attention, like I’m in focus instead of slightly blurred at the edges of his vision.
“It was your idea. The thing you said about jewelry holding memory, about craftsmanship as a form of love made permanent. That’s the heart of everything we’re doing. ”
The words land somewhere soft and undefended, warming me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
I remember that night, sitting at this same counter with my hands wrapped around a mug, talking about my work the way I used to talk about it all the time - with passion, with certainty, with the joy of someone who knew exactly who she was and what she could make.
“You remember that?”
“Of course I remember.” He sounds almost offended. “You were brilliant. You are brilliant. I should have…” He stops, shakes his head. “I should have told you sooner. That it mattered. That it’s the best part of what we’re building.”
I don’t know what to say. I want to be happy… I am happy, in a way, to know that something of mine is at the center of this thing that’s consumed our lives for months.
But underneath the happiness is something sharper, something that tastes like grief.
Because he’s telling me my idea is the heart of the launch, but I won’t be there when it happens. I won’t be standing beside him when those words go out into the world.
Serena will.
“Thank you,” I say, because it’s what you say. “For telling me.”
He nods, and then his eyes narrow slightly, studying my face with an attention I’m not used to anymore. “You look terrible.”
“Wow. Thank you. Really.”
“I mean…” He reaches out and touches my cheek, the backs of his fingers brushing against my skin. “You look tired. Are you getting sick?”
“It’s just a cold. It’s nothing.”
“You should rest.”
“I’m fine, Pietro.”
“You always say that.” There’s something complicated in his voice, something I can’t quite parse. “Even when you’re not fine. You always say you’re fine.”
I could tell him the truth.
I could say I’m tired because I’m doing everything alone, because you leave before dawn and come home after midnight, because I’m raising our children and running this house and watching my ideas walk into the world on someone else’s arm.
I could say I’m not fine, I haven’t been fine in years, and I don’t know how to tell you that without sounding like I’m asking for something you can’t give me.
But the words stick in my throat, the way they always do, and instead I say: “I’ll take some vitamin C. Go to bed early. I’ll be fine by the anniversary.”
“The anniversary.” He blinks, and I watch him do the mental math, watch him realize that he’d forgotten, that the date had slipped past him in the chaos of launch prep. “That’s…”
“Thursday.”
“Right. Thursday.” He rubs the back of his neck, looking guilty. “I’ll be there. I promise.”
I want to believe him. I want so badly to believe that this one night, this one date out of all the dates he’s missed, will be different. But I’ve been married to this man for six years, and I know the weight of his promises versus the weight of his work, and I know which one usually wins.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m making dinner. Your grandmother’s pasta.”
Something shifts in his face - softness, maybe, or memory.
His grandmother taught me that recipe in the early days of our marriage, back when she was still alive and trying to help me fit into this family that didn’t want me.
She was the only Grimaldi who ever made me feel welcome, and she died two years ago, and sometimes I still miss her so much it’s hard to breathe.
“You don’t have to do that,” he says.
“I want to.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and I don’t know what he’s seeing.
The woman he married, maybe, or the woman I’ve become, or some strange combination of the two. Then he reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and the gesture is so gentle, so unexpectedly tender, that my throat closes around whatever I was going to say next.
“I’ll be there,” he says again. “I promise.”
* * *
He stays.
That’s the miracle of it, the thing I’ll turn over in my mind for days afterward.
He stays, and we move to the living room, and he pours himself a whiskey he doesn’t drink and tells me about the launch - the problems, the pressure, the thousand small decisions that are somehow all urgent at once.
I listen with my feet tucked under me on the sofa, and it’s the most we’ve talked in months.
“You should sleep,” I finally say, when the clock is creeping toward midnight and his eyes are starting to droop. “You have early meetings.”
“I know.” But he doesn’t move. He’s looking at the whiskey in his glass, turning it slowly, watching the light catch the amber liquid. “I don’t know when everything got so complicated.”
“It’s launch season. Everything’s complicated during launch season.”
“Not just that.” He sets the glass down and looks at me, really looks at me, in that way he used to when we were first married and still figuring each other out. “Us. When did we get so complicated?”
I don’t have an answer for that. Or rather, I have too many answers - the slow drift of years, the children, the company, his mother’s constant presence and my constant resistance to it, the way we stopped talking about anything that mattered and started talking only about schedules and logistics and who’s picking up the twins from preschool.
“Come here,” I say instead, and I don’t know where the courage comes from, only that I’m tired of the distance and tired of being careful and tired of waiting for him to close the gap first.
He comes. He sits beside me on the sofa, close enough that our knees are touching, and I reach up and start working at the knot of his tie.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking this off. You look like you’re being strangled.”
“I’m fine.”
“You always say that,” I say, echoing his words back at him. “Even when you’re not fine.”
He laughs - a short, surprised sound, like he’d forgotten how - and lets me pull the tie free and toss it over the back of the sofa. I move behind him, tucking my legs on either side of his hips, and dig my thumbs into the knots at the base of his neck.
“God,” he groans. “That’s - yes. Right there.”
“You’re a mess.” I work my way across his shoulders, feeling the tension stored there like something physical, something I can press out with enough patience. “When’s the last time you did anything that wasn’t work?”
“Sunday. With you and the kids.”
“That was two weeks ago.”
“Was it?” He sounds genuinely surprised. “It doesn’t feel like two weeks.”
“That’s because you’ve been living at the office.” I dig into a particularly stubborn knot, and he makes a sound that’s half pain, half relief. “You need to take care of yourself.”
“I will. After the launch.”
“You always say that too.”
He reaches back and catches my hand, stilling my movements.
For a moment we stay like that, frozen, his fingers wrapped around my wrist and my pulse beating against his palm. Then he tugs gently, pulling me around to face him, and his eyes are dark and intent and focused on me in a way they haven’t been in so long.
“Ariah,” he says, and my name in his mouth sounds like a question and an answer all at once.
I don’t know which of us moves first. Maybe it doesn’t matter. What matters is that his mouth finds mine, and the kiss tastes like whiskey and wanting and something desperate underneath, something that says I’m still here, I’m still yours, please don’t forget me.
He kisses like a man who has been starving and only just remembered food exists. Not careful. Not polite. His tongue slides against mine and I make a sound I haven’t made in months, soft and startled and hungry.
His hands fist in my hair, angling my head so he can deepen it, and I climb into his lap properly, straddling him on the sofa, the silk of my lounge pants whispering against his pants.
“Fuck,” he mutters against my mouth. “I’ve missed this. I’ve missed you.”
“Then shut up and show me.”