16. Pietro
— ? —
Pietro
“You’re going to ruin that piece.”
Ariah’s voice carries from across her tiny workspace, where she’s bent over her own project with the focused intensity I’ve come to recognize as her working state. I look down at the silver wire I’ve been attempting to shape for the past twenty minutes and realize she’s right.
What was supposed to be a simple loop has become a tangled mess of metal that looks more like modern art than jewelry.
“I’m trying,” I say, which sounds pathetic even to my own ears.
“Trying and succeeding are different things.” But there’s something almost like amusement in her voice, and I’ll take that over the cold distance she’s maintained for weeks. “Loosen your grip. You’re strangling it.”
I loosen my grip. The wire immediately springs free from my pliers and bounces off the table onto the floor.
“That’s too loose.”
“You could have mentioned that before.”
“Where would be the fun in that?”
I retrieve the wire and try again, feeling ridiculous in a way I haven’t felt since I was a child learning to ride a horse and falling off every thirty seconds. I run companies. I make decisions that affect thousands of people. I have, on occasion, been described as competent.
Apparently none of that translates to jewelry making.
“Why are you here, Pietro?” Ariah asks, not looking up from her work. “Really. You’ve been showing up every few days for two weeks now, asking me to teach you things you’re terrible at. What’s the point?”
“I want to understand what you do.”
“You could watch videos for that.”
“I want to understand it from you.”
She’s quiet for a moment, her hands still moving with practiced precision.
The contrast between her easy competence and my fumbling attempts should be embarrassing, is embarrassing, but I find I don’t mind.
For six years I was the capable one, the one with all the power and resources and answers.
Watching her in her element, watching myself fail at something she excels at, feels like a corrective I didn’t know I needed.
“The metal holds heat differently than you’d expect,” she says finally, something shifting in her voice toward instruction.
“You have to anticipate what it’s going to do, not just react to what it’s doing now.
Here…” She crosses to my station and adjusts my grip on the pliers, her fingers cool against mine.
“Like this. The pressure comes from here, not here.”
“Okay.” I try to focus on her instructions and not on the fact that she’s standing close enough for me to smell her shampoo - something citrus and clean, different from the expensive products that filled our bathroom at home. “Like this?”
“Better.” She watches me work for a moment. “You’re still too tense. Relax your shoulders.”
“I’m relaxed.”
“You’re not. You look like you’re about to wrestle the wire into submission.”
“That was actually my plan.”
She laughs - a short, surprised sound that she immediately tries to stifle and something in my chest loosens at the sound of it. This is what I’ve been missing. This ease, this humor, this version of us that used to exist before I let everything else take priority.
I go back to practicing, and she returns to her own work, and we exist in a companionable silence that feels almost normal.
The twins are napping in the next room. I can hear Luca’s small snores through the thin walls and Piper is out running errands, and for one suspended afternoon, we’re almost like a family again.
“Damn.” Ariah’s voice breaks the quiet, sharp with frustration.
“What happened?”
“Tool slipped.” She’s examining her hand, where a thin line of red is appearing along her palm. “It’s nothing.”
“Let me see.”
“Pietro…”
“Let me see.” I’m already moving, crossing the small space between us, taking her hand in mine before she can argue. The cut is shallow but bleeding steadily, and I feel a disproportionate surge of protectiveness at the sight of it.
“I need to clean this.”
“I can do it myself.”
“I know you can. Let me anyway.”
She doesn’t pull away, which I take as permission.
I find the small first aid kit she keeps in the workshop - of course she has one, she’s always been prepared for everything - and I clean the cut carefully, methodically, trying not to think about how many times she must have done this alone.
All the small injuries of her work, tended in solitude because I was never here.
“You don’t have to…”
“Yes, I do.” I wrap the bandage around her palm, securing it with tape. “I’m your husband. Taking care of you is literally in the job description.”
“Ex-husband. Pending.”
“Not signed yet.” I release her hand but don’t step back. “Not giving up yet.”
She looks at me. Really looks, in a way she’s been avoiding since I started these visits - and something complicated moves through her expression.
I wish I could read it. I used to think I knew her better than anyone, but somewhere along the way I stopped seeing her clearly, and now I’m having to relearn the language of her face.
“You’ve burned yourself,” she says.
“What?”
“Your hand.” She gestures, and I look down to see a small burn on my finger from where I touched the heated wire earlier, red and raw and completely unnoticed until this moment.
“It’s nothing.”
“Let me see.” Her voice carries the ghost of my words back at me, and when she takes my hand in hers to examine the burn, I feel the echo of all the times I should have been here and wasn’t.
* * *
Later, after the twins wake up and I help with dinner, which means staying out of the way while Ariah actually cooks, a skill she apparently developed in self-defense after years of managing a household alone, I stop by the company office to check on a few things.
The building is mostly empty at this hour, just a skeleton crew handling overnight operations, but as I pass through the executive floor I hear voices from one of the side offices. Rosa’s voice, I realize, the longtime staffer who’s been with the family for fifteen years now.
She must have been sent over with the last household receipts that got mixed into the launch-event expenses, because she practically runs everything the rest of us forget to notice.
And Serena’s voice, sharp and cold in a way I’ve never heard it before.
I stop just outside the door, listening.
“…completely unacceptable. I asked for the receipts an hour ago.”
“I apologize, Signorina Salerno. There was a delay. The household accounts needed to be sorted from the event expenses…”
“I don’t want excuses. I want results.” Serena’s voice drips with contempt. “Do you have any idea who I am? What I could do to your position with a single word to Pietro?”
“I’m doing my best…”
“Your best isn’t good enough. Your best is the kind of incompetence that should have gotten you fired years ago. If it weren’t for misplaced loyalty to the Grimaldi family, you’d be out on the street where you belong.”
I push the door open.
The scene freezes: Rosa looking small and frightened, her eyes red, a folder of household receipts clutched to her chest; Serena towering over her with an expression of pure disdain that vanishes the moment she sees me, replaced instantly by the warm, professional mask she wears in public.
“Pietro!” Her voice transforms into honey. “I didn’t know you were still here. I was just helping Rosa understand the urgency of the expense documents I requested…”
“Rosa, would you excuse us?” My voice comes out harder than I intend, but I don’t soften it. “And please - take the rest of the evening off. The receipts can wait until tomorrow.”
Rosa practically flees, casting one grateful glance at me as she goes. The door clicks shut behind her.
“Pietro, I can explain…”
“Explain what?” I turn to face Serena fully. “Explain why you were speaking to a valued employee like she was something you scraped off your shoe? Explain why the woman my mother insisted was perfect for this partnership treats the staff like servants when she thinks no one important is watching?”
“She was being difficult…”
“She was doing her job.” I step closer, and I see something flicker in Serena’s eyes.
Uncertainty, maybe, or the calculation of someone realizing they’ve been caught.
“I’ve been watching you, Serena. Not as closely as I should have, but I’m paying attention now.
And what I’m seeing doesn’t match the image you’ve been presenting. ”
“Your mother…”
“My mother isn’t here. And my mother doesn’t run this family, no matter how much she wishes she did.
” I hold her gaze until she looks away. “Stay away from my wife. Stay away from my children. And if I ever hear you speaking to an employee like that again, partnership or no partnership, I will end your involvement with this company personally.”
I don’t wait for her response. I walk out, and I think about Ariah - alone in her tiny apartment, rebuilding her life one commission at a time, managing two children and a career and a legal separation without any of the resources I have at my disposal.
She did all of that. She’s been doing all of that, for years, while I was too blind to see it.
The weight of that understanding settles onto my shoulders as I drive home to an empty house. I finally understand how completely she carried everything by herself. How long I let her do it alone.
And I understand that teaching me to shape wire, letting me bandage her wounds, allowing me into the edges of her new life - that’s not forgiveness. That’s patience. That’s the woman I married deciding I’m worth the effort of waiting to see if I can change.
I intend to prove I can.