28. Pietro
— ? —
Pietro
The Bay of Naples has never looked more beautiful than it does today.
The sun is high and the water is that impossible blue that postcards can’t quite capture, and my children are fighting over the last piece of bread meant for the seagulls with the particular ferocity that only five-year-olds can muster.
“I had it first!” Luca’s voice carries across the deck of the small yacht I rented for the day.
“You had the last three pieces!” Lucy is not backing down. “It’s my turn!”
“You don’t even like feeding the birds!”
“I like it now!”
Ariah catches my eye across the deck, her lips pressed together in that way that means she’s trying not to laugh. She’s wearing a sundress that makes her look like she belongs on this boat, in this light, in this life we’ve somehow managed to rebuild from the wreckage.
“You could intervene,” she suggests.
“I could. But then I’d miss the entertainment.”
“Your children are going to push each other overboard.”
“They’re wearing life jackets, and I’m right here.”
She laughs - a real laugh, open and unguarded, the kind I didn’t hear for years because I’d forgotten how to make her happy. The sound of it makes my chest tight in the best possible way.
“Fine,” I say, pushing myself up from the deck chair. “I’ll handle it.”
I cross to where the twins are locked in their standoff, both of them clutching the same piece of bread with grim determination.
“I have a solution,” I announce.
They look at me with identical expressions of suspicion. They’ve learned to be wary of my “solutions,” which often involve vegetables or bedtime.
“What if…” I take the bread from both their hands, ignoring the protests. “What if we tear it in half, and you both throw at the same time?”
“That’s boring,” Luca complains.
“Boring is underrated. Boring keeps people from falling off boats.”
“I wasn’t going to fall off the boat.”
“You were absolutely going to fall off the boat.” I tear the bread and hand each of them half. “On three. One, two…”
They both throw before I get to three, because they’re five and patience is not their strong suit. The seagulls descend in a chaotic swirl of wings and noise, and both twins shriek with delight, the fight already forgotten.
Crisis averted.
I return to Ariah, settling into the chair beside her.
“Very diplomatic,” she says.
“I’ve been practicing.”
“I noticed.” She reaches over and takes my hand, and the simple gesture still surprises me - the ease of it, the assumption that touching me is allowed. For months after she came back to me, every touch felt like a gift I hadn’t earned. Now it’s starting to feel like something we both deserve.
“This was a good idea,” she says, looking out at the water. “The boat. The day. All of it.”
“I have good ideas sometimes.”
“Sometimes.” She’s smiling. “Very occasionally. In the right light.”
“You wound me.”
“You’ll survive.”
We sit in comfortable silence, watching the twins chase each other around the deck while the boat rocks gently beneath us.
It’s been six months since the birthday party, since everything with my mother and Serena came crashing down, since the world finally saw what I should have seen years ago.
Six months of rebuilding. Of learning how to be present.
Of watching Ariah step back into the professional life she’d let go of for me.
Maison d’Emery has her name on the door again.
Not as a subsidiary, not as a merger asset, but as her own.
She’s running the creative direction herself, building something that’s entirely hers, and I’ve restructured my own work to make room for it.
Fewer late nights. Fewer missed dinners.
An empire that runs around the family instead of demanding the family sacrifice itself for the empire.
It’s not perfect. Nothing ever is. But it’s better than it’s ever been.
“Piper texted,” Ariah says, checking her phone. “She’s at the marina, ready to pick up the monsters whenever we’re done.”
“Already?”
“We’ve been out for four hours.”
“Has it been that long?”
“Time flies when you’re mediating bread disputes.”
I look at the twins - sun-kissed and happy, their earlier fight completely forgotten as they lean over the rail to watch something in the water. They’re good kids. They’ve always been good kids, even when I was too absent to appreciate it.
“What do you think?” I ask Ariah. “Should we head back?”
“In a bit.” She squeezes my hand. “I’m enjoying this.”
“The boat?”
“The quiet. The peace. Not worrying about who’s going to show up uninvited or what crisis is waiting around the corner.” She tilts her face up to the sun, eyes closed. “I forgot what it felt like to just… be. Without the constant vigilance.”
“I’m sorry you had to be vigilant in the first place.”
“I know you are.” She opens her eyes and looks at me, and there’s no accusation in her gaze, no residual anger. Just acceptance. “But we’re past that now. We don’t have to keep apologizing for the same things.”
“Old habits.”
“Bad habits. Let’s find new ones.”
She shifts in her chair, tucking her feet underneath her, and something about the movement catches my attention - the easy grace of it, the way the sun catches the braided bracelet on her wrist - the one I made her from the twins’ craft kit, all clashing colors and uneven knots. She still wears it.
“You have salt in your hair,” I say.
“Do I?” She reaches up to touch it.
“Right there.” I lean over and brush my fingers through the strands near her temple, not because there’s actually salt there but because I want to touch her.
Because I can. Because for the first time in longer than I can remember, reaching for her doesn’t feel like asking permission or offering an apology.
She catches my hand before I can pull away. “There’s no salt.”
“There might have been.”
“Liar.”
“Terrible liar. You’ve mentioned.”
“Many times.” But she’s smiling, and she hasn’t let go of my hand, and something warm spreads through my chest at the realization that we’re just - doing this. Just being together. No crisis to navigate, no wound to address, no careful negotiation of who owes what to whom.
Just us, on a boat, with the sun on our faces and nowhere we have to be.
“I like this,” I say.
“The boat?”
“No. Well, yes. But I mean…” I gesture vaguely between us. “This. Being able to just… be with you. Without everything else.”
She squeezes my hand. “Me too.”
* * *
We dock at the marina an hour later, and Piper is waiting exactly where she said she’d be, looking slightly windswept and completely unbothered.
“Aunt Piper!” Lucy tries to launch herself off the boat before it’s fully secured, but I catch her around the waist.
“Hold on, piccola. Let me help you down safely.” I lower her to the dock once we’re properly moored, and she immediately runs to Piper. “We saw dolphins!”
“You did not,” Piper says, catching her.
“We did! Papa said they were dolphins.”
Piper looks at me over Lucy’s head. “Were they dolphins?”
“They might have been very large fish.”
“They were dolphins,” Luca insists. “I know what dolphins look like.”
“Of course you do.” Piper sets Lucy down and opens her arms for Luca. “Alright, sea monsters. Who wants ice cream?”
The response is deafening.
“You’re going to spoil them,” Ariah says, but she’s smiling.
“That’s literally my job as the fun aunt. You handle discipline; I handle sugar.” Piper takes both twins by the hand. “We’ll be at the apartment whenever you’re ready to pick them up. No rush.”
She winks at Ariah in a way that’s not remotely subtle, and I feel heat rise to my face. The twins are oblivious, already chattering about what flavor they want, and they disappear down the dock without a backward glance.
“Well,” Ariah says, watching them go. “That was…”
“Not subtle at all?”
“Not even a little bit.”
We stand on the dock for a moment, the boat rocking gently behind us, the late afternoon sun warm on our shoulders. The marina is quiet - most of the day-trippers have already gone, and it’s too early for the evening crowd.
“What do you want to do?” Ariah asks.
I look at her - this woman I almost lost, who built a life without me, who chose to let me back in despite every reason she had not to.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders, wind-tangled from the day on the water, and her skin is flushed with sun, and she’s looking at me with an expression that makes my heart do something complicated in my chest.
“I want to stay on the boat,” I say. “Just us. For a while.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment, and I see the decision move through her - the consideration, the choice, the smile that finally breaks across her face.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s stay.”
* * *
I barely get the cabin hatch closed before she’s on me.
Ariah kisses like she owns the boat, owns the afternoon, owns me - and she does, she absolutely fucking does. I back into the narrow bunk and she climbs into my lap, sundress hitching up her thighs, laughing against my mouth when the boat rocks and we nearly tip sideways into the bulkhead.
“Smooth,” she teases, nipping my lower lip.
“The ocean is conspiring against my dignity.”
“What dignity?” She bites harder, then soothes the sting with her tongue. “You just spent four hours narrating seagull diplomacy. I watched you mediate a bread crisis like it was a board negotiation.”
“And somehow you’re still wet for me. Miraculous.”
She gasps - mock scandalized, actually delighted - and then she’s shoving my shirt up and off while I get my hands under her dress. Warm skin. The curve of her hip. The soft give of her ass in my palms. And then-
No underwear.
Of course no underwear.
I groan when my fingers drag through the slick heat of her cunt, bare and ready and so wet I have to drop my forehead to her shoulder for a second just to stay upright.
“You little menace,” I mutter. “You’ve been like this all day? On my boat? Watching me tear bread for seagulls with nothing on under this dress?”