12. Ariah
— ? —
Ariah
The apartment is nothing like the Grimaldi house.
It’s small. Two bedrooms, a kitchen barely big enough to turn around in, a living room that doubles as Piper’s sleeping quarters since she refuses to leave until she’s sure I’m okay.
The furniture came with the rental, mismatched and slightly shabby, nothing like the curated elegance I’ve been living in for six years.
I love it.
The cold finally broke a few days ago. Just exhaustion and a virus, nothing serious, though it felt like my body was giving up along with everything else.
Now I’m thirty-two years old, starting over, and I love the creaky floorboards and the window that sticks and the radiator that makes alarming noises in the middle of the night.
I love that no one has opinions about how I arrange the cushions or what I feed my children for breakfast or whether my presence is an embarrassment to the family name.
I love that when I wake up in the morning, the only expectations waiting for me are the ones I set myself.
The savings I’d built up from my founder days. Money I’d kept separate, just in case, covered the deposit and first month’s rent. Proof that some part of me always knew I might need an exit.
“Mama, look!” Luca runs in from the bedroom, waving a drawing that’s mostly scribbles with a vaguely recognizable human shape in the middle. “I made Papa!”
My heart does something complicated in my chest. “That’s beautiful, baby. Should we put it on the fridge?”
“Yes! And then we can show Papa when he comes to see us.”
I don’t know what to say to that. It’s been two weeks since I left, two weeks of ignoring Pietro’s calls and reading his texts without responding and trying to figure out what a future without him looks like.
But the twins don’t understand any of that. All they know is that they miss their father, that the man who used to carry them on his shoulders is suddenly not there anymore.
“We’ll see,” I say, which is my answer for everything these days.
Piper appears in the kitchen doorway, phone in hand, her expression careful. “He’s here.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
I move to the window and look down at the street below, and there he is. Pietro, standing on the sidewalk in front of my building, no car, no driver, no armor of wealth and status. Just a man in a wrinkled shirt, looking up at windows he can’t see through.
“How long has he been there?”
“About an hour.”
“An hour?”
“He texted me,” she says. “He asked if he could come by, not upstairs, just to the building. I told him I’d check with you first. You said he could know where the children were staying, so I gave him the address and told him not to come up.”
“What did he say?”
“That he’d wait.”
I watch him for a moment longer. He’s pacing now, short restless movements that speak to agitation he’s trying to contain.
Every few seconds he glances up at the building, hope and fear warring on his face. He looks terrible. Unshaven, exhausted, nothing like the polished businessman who stood on that stage two weeks ago with another woman on his arm.
Good. Let him suffer.
But even as I think it, something in me aches. I spent six years loving this man, and love doesn’t just evaporate because you want it to. It lingers, inconvenient and unwelcome, making everything more complicated than it should be.
“I’ll go down,” I hear myself say.
“Ari…”
“I’m not taking him back. I just…” I don’t know how to finish. “I need to say some things. To his face.”
Piper nods slowly. “I’ll stay with the kids.”
The elevator takes forever. I use the time to gather my thoughts, to remind myself why I left, to steel myself against whatever he’s going to say.
He’ll apologize. He’ll make promises. He’ll be charming and sincere and I’ll want to believe him, because that’s what I’ve always done.
Not this time.
He sees me the moment I step out of the building, and his face transforms - hope, relief, fear, desperation, all of it flickering across his features in quick succession.
“Ariah.” He takes a step toward me, then stops, like he’s not sure he’s allowed. “Thank you. For coming down.”
“You’ve been standing out here for an hour.”
“I would have waited longer.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know what else to do.” He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture I recognize from a thousand moments of stress and frustration. “You won’t answer my calls. You won’t respond to my messages. I didn’t know how else to see you.”
“Maybe that should tell you something.”
“It tells me you’re hurt. It tells me I hurt you, badly, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“You can’t fix it.”
“Let me try.”
“Pietro…”
“I won’t sign the papers.” He says it like a declaration, like a line in the sand. “I won’t let this marriage end without at least trying to earn my family back.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“I know. I know I don’t have any right to ask for anything.
I know I failed you in a thousand ways and I let my mother poison our marriage and I stopped seeing you when I should have been paying closer attention.
But I love you, Ariah. I have always loved you, even when I was terrible at showing it. ”
“Love isn’t enough.” I’m repeating myself from our phone call, but it’s still true. “It’s never been enough.”
“Then tell me what is. Tell me what I need to do.”
“I don’t know.” The honesty of it catches me off guard. “I don’t know if there’s anything you can do. I spent six years waiting for you to choose me, and you never did. Not once. Not when it mattered.”
“I’m choosing you now.”
“Now that I’ve left. Now that I’ve forced your hand. That’s not choosing, Pietro. That’s scrambling to keep something you didn’t appreciate when you had it.”
He flinches, and I feel a grim satisfaction that I landed a blow. Then I feel terrible for feeling satisfied, and then I feel angry at myself for feeling terrible, and the whole tangled mess of emotions is exhausting.
“What can I do?” he asks again, quieter now. “What can I do to prove I mean it?”
“I don’t know.” I wrap my arms around myself, cold despite the mild evening. “I don’t know if you can. I don’t know if I want you to.”
“Do you still love me?”
The question lands like a stone in still water.
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s the only point that matters.”
“No, it isn’t.” I step back, putting distance between us.
“The point is trust. The point is showing up. The point is all the daily choices that make a marriage work, and you’ve been failing at those for years.
Love doesn’t fix that. Love doesn’t undo three years of feeling invisible in my own home. ”
“Then let me start over. Let me prove I can be different.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’ll figure it out. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Words, Pietro. More words.”
“Then let me turn them into actions. Give me a chance.”
I look at this man I married, this man I loved, this man who broke my heart without even realizing he was doing it. He looks wrecked. He looks like a man who’s finally woken up to find his house burning down around him.
Part of me wants to comfort him. Part of me wants to scream at him. Part of me wants to walk back upstairs and never come down again.
“I need you to leave,” I say.
“Ariah…”
“I need you to leave, and I need time, and I need you to stop showing up and making this harder than it already is.”
“I can’t just…”
“Yes, you can.” My voice sharpens. “You spent six years staying away when I wanted you there. Now I’m asking you to stay away while I figure out what I want. Surely that’s not too much to ask.”
He stares at me for a long moment, and I watch him struggle with it - the instinct to push, to fight, to force his way through this the way he forces his way through business deals and family expectations. Then something in him gives way.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “I’ll go. But I’m not giving up, Ariah. I’m going to find a way to earn you back.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
He turns and walks away, no car waiting for him, just a man disappearing down an ordinary Naples street like any other ordinary person.
I watch him go. Watch his shoulders, the way they curve inward like he’s carrying something too heavy. Watch him reach the corner and pause, just for a moment, his head turning slightly as if he might look back.
He doesn’t. He rounds the corner and he’s gone.
I stand there longer than I should, staring at the empty street, at the space where he used to be. The evening air is cool against my face, and somewhere a church bell is ringing, and Naples goes on around me like my world hasn’t just shifted on its axis again.
When I finally go back upstairs, Piper is waiting with questions in her eyes that she doesn’t ask. The twins are playing in the bedroom, oblivious to the earthquake happening in their parents’ lives. The apartment is small and shabby and nothing like the life I was supposed to have.
I go to the window anyway. Look down at the street below.
Empty. He actually left.
Something in my chest does something complicated - relief, maybe, that he respected what I asked. Or something lonelier than relief, something that notices the absence and aches anyway.
He’s fighting now, in a way he never fought before. Showing up. Asking instead of assuming. Leaving when I tell him to leave.
It doesn’t change anything. It can’t be enough, not yet, not after everything.
But I stand at the window for a long time, looking at the street where he walked away, before I finally turn back to the life I’m building without him.