29. Ariah
— ? —
Ariah
Pietro has been acting strange for a week.
Not bad strange - he’s been present, attentive, all the things he’s learned to be over the past six months.
But there’s something else underneath it, some energy I can’t quite identify.
He keeps looking at me with this expression on his face, like he’s waiting for something, and every time I ask him about it, he changes the subject.
“You’re being weird,” I tell him over breakfast.
“I’m not being weird.”
“You are definitely being weird.”
“I’m being normal. This is my normal face.”
“Papa has a secret,” Luca announces through a mouthful of cereal. “He’s bad at secrets.”
“I don’t have a secret.”
“Yes you do.” Lucy is nodding sagely. “Your eyebrows go up when you have a secret. They’re going up right now.”
Pietro claps a hand to his forehead. “Traitors. Both of you.”
“We learned it from Mama,” Luca says. “She always knows when we’re lying.”
“Because you’re very bad liars,” I tell him. “Just like your father.”
“I am an excellent liar.”
“You are possibly the worst liar I’ve ever met.” I reach across the table and take his hand. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
“I know I can.” He turns his hand over, lacing his fingers through mine. “And I will. Tonight. I have something planned.”
“Something planned?”
“Piper’s taking the kids. We’re having dinner. Just us.”
“Okay.” I search his face for clues. “Should I be worried?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Your eyebrows are going up,” Lucy observes.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Pietro mutters, but he’s smiling.
* * *
The restaurant he’s chosen is small and intimate, tucked away in a corner of Naples I’ve never explored. It’s not the kind of place the Grimaldis usually frequent - no chandeliers, no society regulars, no one who might recognize us and start whispering about the scandalous saga of our marriage.
“I used to come here when I was younger,” Pietro says, as we settle into our table by the window. “Before my father died. Before everything became about the family name and the empire. It was just a place I liked.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He says it without accusation - just fact. “There’s a lot I never told you, because I got so caught up in being what everyone expected that I forgot what I actually was underneath it all.”
“And what were you?”
“A kid who liked this restaurant. Who used to come here with his father and order too much pasta and watch the boats in the harbor.” He looks out the window, where the evening light is turning the water gold. “I wanted to bring you here. To share this part of myself that I forgot existed.”
Something soft opens in my chest. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. The food might be terrible. It’s been twenty years.”
It’s not terrible. It’s wonderful - simple and fresh and exactly the kind of meal I would have chosen for myself, which tells me he’s been paying attention in ways that go beyond the obvious.
We eat and talk about nothing important, about the twins and work and a movie Piper recommended that neither of us will probably watch, and it’s easy in a way our conversations never used to be.
“I have something for you,” Pietro says, when the plates have been cleared and we’re lingering over coffee.
“A gift?”
“A question, actually.” He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small box, and my heart stutters in my chest. “And a ring, if you want it.”
I stare at the box. “Pietro…”
“Let me say this.” He opens the box, and inside is a sapphire.
Not a diamond - a sapphire, deep blue and clear, set in a simple band that looks nothing like the ring I left on a counter almost a year ago.
“The first time I married you, I did it wrong. It was a merger. A contract. The business arrangement was my mother’s doing - she saw an opportunity to absorb a competitor - but the marriage itself?
She fought that. She never wanted you in this family.
I chose you anyway, but I let her poison what we had. ”
“I remember.”
“But I fell in love with you anyway. Despite the arrangement. Despite everything. And then I spent years being terrible at showing it, and you left, and I almost lost you forever.”
“You didn’t lose me.”
“I came close.” He takes my hand across the table. “I don’t want to make that mistake again. I don’t want to take you for granted, or assume you’ll always be here, or forget to tell you that you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Pietro…”
“So I’m asking you. Not because I have to, not because there’s a contract or an arrangement or anyone expecting anything from us. I’m asking because I want to. Because I choose you. Because I want to spend the rest of my life earning the second chance you gave me.”
He looks at me, and his eyes are bright with something that might be tears, and his voice is steady even though his hand is trembling slightly in mine.
“Ariah Emery-Grimaldi. Will you marry me again?”
I look at the sapphire, at this man who drove me crazy for years and then spent months proving he could be different. I think about the first wedding - a civil ceremony I barely remember, legal proceedings dressed up as vows, two strangers agreeing to a business arrangement they didn’t understand.
This is nothing like that.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I’ll marry you again.”
His whole face transforms - relief and joy and something that looks almost like disbelief, as if he wasn’t entirely sure I’d say yes despite everything.
“Really?”
“Really.” I’m crying now, which is embarrassing, but I don’t care. “I want to marry you. I want to choose you, out loud, in front of everyone. I want to do this properly.”
He slides the ring onto my finger, and it fits perfectly - of course it does, he’s been planning this carefully - and the sapphire catches the candlelight and throws blue sparks across the tablecloth.
“I love you,” he says. “More than I’ve ever loved anything.”
“I love you too.” I lean across the table and kiss him, and I feel him smile against my mouth. “We’re really doing this.”
“We’re really doing this.”
“A real wedding.”
“A real wedding.” He pulls back, looking at me with an intensity that makes my heart race. “Whatever you want. However you want it. I just want to stand up in front of everyone and promise to spend my life with you.”
“That’s very romantic.”
“I’m a very romantic person now.”
“Since when?”
“Since you taught me how to be.”
I laugh, wiping my eyes. “Okay, romantic person. Let’s plan a wedding.”