4. Cielo
— ? —
Cielo
The following night, he comes home at eleven, which is earlier than I expected and later than I hoped, and I’m sitting on the terrace with my hands wrapped around a cup of tea that went cold an hour ago, watching the lighthouse beam sweep across the dark water in its slow, patient rhythm.
I hear the car first, then his footsteps on the gravel, then the pause at the door that tells me he’s steeling himself for whatever version of me he’s about to find.
The angry one, the cold one, the crying one.
I’ve been all three this week, sometimes within the same hour.
Tonight I’m just tired. Too tired for another fight, too tired for another round of accusations and apologies that change nothing. I don’t even turn when I hear him step onto the terrace behind me.
“You’re still up,” he says.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
He doesn’t respond right away, and I can feel him standing there, trying to read my mood, calculate his approach. I hate that he has to do that now. I hate that we’ve become people who strategize around each other instead of just being together.
“I brought you something.”
That makes me turn. He’s standing in the doorway with his jacket over his arm and something small in his hand - a velvet box, the kind that holds jewelry.
His expression is wary, hopeful, exhausted in a way that mirrors my own.
He looks like a man who’s been fighting a war and isn’t sure if he’s winning.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
He crosses to where I’m sitting and holds out the box, and I take it because refusing would require energy I don’t have. The velvet is soft under my fingers, expensive, and when I lift the lid, my breath catches in my throat.
It’s a necklace. A delicate gold chain with a tiny star pendant, simple and perfect, and I know exactly where I’ve seen it before.
“Giovanni.” My voice comes out strange - thick, unsteady. “This is-”
“From that shop window. Three years ago, when I used to pick you up from the university.” He crouches down beside my chair, and his eyes are dark and serious in the moonlight.
“You stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at it for five minutes. I asked if you wanted it, and you laughed and said you didn’t need more jewelry. ”
“I remember.”
“But you did want it. I could see it in your face.” He takes the necklace from the box, and his fingers brush mine as he does. “I’ve been looking for it ever since. The shop closed, the owner moved, I had Beppe tracking it across half of Italy. I finally found it yesterday.”
Three years. He’s been looking for three years for a necklace I mentioned once, in passing, before we were even married. While I’ve been sitting here convincing myself that I don’t matter to him anymore, he’s been hunting down a piece of jewelry because I looked at it too long through a window.
“Turn around,” he says softly. “Let me put it on you.”
I should say something. I should tell him that a necklace doesn’t fix the distance, doesn’t erase the nights I’ve spent alone, doesn’t change the fact that Ludovica has seen more of him this month than I have.
“Giovanni, I can’t just-” My voice catches. “You can’t buy your way back with jewelry.”
“I’m not trying to buy anything.” He doesn’t move, just holds the necklace between us like an offering. “I’m trying to show you that I see you. That I’ve always seen you, even when I’ve been too stupid to prove it.”
“Seeing me isn’t the same as being here.”
“I know.” His voice cracks on the words. “God, Cielo, I know. I’ve been watching you disappear in front of me for weeks, and every time I reach for you, something pulls me away, and I keep telling myself it’s temporary, it’s necessary, it’s almost over-”
“It’s always almost over.”
“This time it’s true.” He leans closer, still crouched beside me, as I set the empty box on the arm of my chair. “Look at me. Please.”
I don’t want to. Looking at him means seeing the exhaustion, the guilt, the desperate love that’s always been there underneath everything else. Looking at him means remembering why I married him in the first place.
I look anyway.
“I found this necklace because I couldn’t stop thinking about the way your face looked that day,” he says. “You were so happy, just looking at it through the glass. And I thought - I want to be the reason she looks like that. I want to give her things that make her eyes light up.”
“My eyes don’t need things to light up. They need you.”
“I know.” He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it. “I know. And I’m here now. I’m asking you to let me try.”
The silence stretches between us, and I feel the weight of everything I want to say pressing against my teeth. The loneliness. The fear. The growing sense that I’ve been slowly disappearing inside this marriage.
But the words that come out are simpler.
“Put it on me.”
He exhales like he’s been holding his breath for weeks. I turn and lift my hair, and I feel his fingers at the back of my neck, warm and careful as he works the clasp.
The pendant settles against my collarbone, cool and light, and his hands don’t leave my shoulders.
“I know I’ve been failing you.” His voice is rough, close to my ear.
“I know this trip hasn’t been what I promised.
But Cielo - you are the only thing that matters to me.
Everything I’m doing here, every meeting, every deal, every hour I spend away from you - it’s all to build something that keeps you safe. That keeps us safe.”
“I don’t want to be kept safe.” I turn to face him, and his hands slide down my arms to catch my wrists. “I want to be kept close.”
“I know.” He presses his forehead to mine. “I know. And I’m going to do better. The mission is almost over. One more week, maybe less, and then I take you home and spend the rest of my life making up for every moment I’ve missed.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I know.” He exhales. “Saying it has always been easier than doing it.”
“Then prove it.” The words come out fiercer than I intended. “Stop telling me and prove it. Be here. Be present. Be my husband instead of whatever ghost has been walking around in your body for the past month.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me, and something shifts in his expression - something raw and desperate that I haven’t seen since the early days, when he was still trying to convince me that a man like him could love a woman like me.
“I’m here now,” he says. “Right now, in this moment, I’m here. What do you need from me?”
What do I need? I need him to stop leaving. I need him to look at me the way he used to, like I was the only thing in the room worth seeing. I need him to touch me like he means it, like he’s choosing me instead of just coming home to me out of obligation.
I need him to make me believe that I’m still his.
“I need you to stay,” I say. “Tonight. No phone calls, no early meetings, no disappearing before I wake up. Just stay.”
“Done.”
“I’m serious, Giovanni. If you leave again-”
He kisses me before I can finish the sentence, and it’s not the careful, apologetic kiss of the past few days.
It’s hungry and desperate and a little bit angry, three years of marriage and three weeks of distance colliding in the space between our mouths.
His hands come up to cradle my face, and I grab the front of his shirt and pull him closer, and somewhere in the back of my mind I’m thinking that this doesn’t fix anything, that we still have so much to talk about, that one night of passion doesn’t erase weeks of neglect.
But his mouth is on my neck now, and his hands are sliding down my back, and the pendant he gave me is warm against my skin, and I decide that the talking can wait.
He takes my hand and leads me inside, through the living room where his jacket ends up on the floor in a heap of expensive wool, toward the daybed by the window where the moon is just rising over the water.
The terrace door clicks shut behind us. Somewhere in the house a clock ticks.
Outside, the lighthouse keeps its slow, patient sweep.
I should still be angry. I am still angry. The anger sits under my ribs like a coal that won’t go out - but his mouth finds mine again in the dark of the living room, and the coal flares into something hotter, hungrier, impossible to hold at arm’s length.
“Cielo.” My name in his mouth is a prayer and a curse at once. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” I say, and it comes out raw. “All of you. Not the ghost. Not the man who keeps vanishing. You.”
“You have me.” His hands are already at the ties of my robe, working them open with fingers that have signed contracts and ordered deaths and somehow still know exactly how to undress his wife. “You’ve always fucking had me.”
The robe slips from my shoulders. Underneath I’m wearing the thin cotton nightgown I put on hours ago when I thought I’d be sleeping alone again, and his eyes go dark when he sees it - the familiar fabric, the soft worn edge at the collar, the way it hangs off one shoulder because the seam gave out last summer and I never fixed it.
“This fucking thing,” he murmurs, almost laughing, almost broken. “You’ve been wearing this without me.”
“I’ve been wearing everything without you.”
Something fractures in his expression. He drops to his knees on the stone floor in front of me - Giovanni Salvatore, the most feared man on this coast, kneeling on cold tile with his hands on my hips and his mouth pressed to the soft of my stomach through cotton.
He breathes there. Just breathes. Like he’s remembering how.
“I’m going to take this off,” he says against the fabric. “And then I’m going to put my mouth on every inch of you I’ve been denying myself. And then I’m going to fuck you until you stop looking at me like I’m already gone.”
“That’s a lot of promises.”
“I intend to keep all of them.”