30. Cielo
— ? —
Cielo
The Milan house is quiet this morning.
Quiet in the good way, I mean - the way that means Gio is still asleep and Delphine is having her coffee in the guest suite and Beppe and Rino are somewhere on the grounds, keeping watch over a family they’ve adopted as their own.
I stand at the bedroom window, looking out at the garden where we got married two weeks ago, at the terracotta walls I once begged for and Giovanni finally gave me, at the life we’ve built out of ruins and hope and stubborn refusal to give up.
“You’re up early.” Giovanni’s voice is sleep-rough behind me, and I turn to find him propped up on one elbow, watching me with eyes that are soft in a way I’m still getting used to.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Bad dreams?”
“No.” I cross to the bed and sit beside him, letting him pull me close. “Good ones, actually. I just wanted to see them from the outside.”
“The dreams?”
“The reality.” I gesture toward the window. “All of it. The house, the garden, the horses in the stable, the telescope Gio’s already planning to use tonight. I wanted to see it and make sure it was still there.”
“It’s still there.” He presses a kiss to my temple. “It’s not going anywhere.”
“I know. I’m just-” I search for the words. “I spent five years running. Five years waking up every morning and checking the exits, planning escape routes, teaching my son drills for emergencies. It’s hard to turn that off.”
“You don’t have to turn it off. You just have to know it’s not necessary anymore.”
“Isn’t it, though?” I turn to face him. “The Falcones are gone, but there are others. There will always be others. Your world-”
“My world is this house,” he interrupts gently. “This family. Everything else is just… maintenance. Management. Problems other people handle so I can be here, with you, watching our son grow up.”
“And Gio? When he’s older?”
“Will never be part of it.” Giovanni’s voice is firm.
“That’s a promise I made to myself the moment I learned he existed.
He’s going to have a normal life. School, friends, dreams that have nothing to do with power or territory or the weight of my name.
He’s going to be an astronaut, or a scientist, or whatever else he decides to be. ”
“He changes his mind every week. Last week it was astronaut-veterinarian.”
“Then he’ll be an astronaut-veterinarian. In space, taking care of space animals.”
I laugh, because the image is absurd and wonderful and so completely Giovanni - taking our son’s impossible dreams seriously, planning for futures that exist only in a child’s imagination.
“I love you,” I say, because it’s true and because I can say it now without fear.
“I love you too.” He pulls me down beside him. “Stay in bed a little longer. The world can wait.”
* * *
The world does wait, as it turns out.
Delphine joins us for breakfast, bright-eyed and recovered, the woman who helped me survive five years of hiding now settling into a life that doesn’t require constant vigilance.
She and Beppe have developed an unlikely friendship based on shared exasperation with Gio’s endless questions and Giovanni’s tendency to spoil him.
“He asked me this morning if astronauts can bring horses into space,” Delphine reports, accepting coffee from a laughing Rino. “I told him no, and he said he would just have to invent a horse spaceship.”
“A horse spaceship,” Giovanni repeats.
“His exact words.”
“I’ll add it to the engineering challenge list.” He catches my eye and winks. “Right after the diamond-collecting net for Neptune.”
This is what I never dared imagine, in all those years of running. Not just safety - that I could picture, in the abstract. But this. The easy morning conversations. The family rhythms. The knowledge that the people around this table aren’t just allies or protectors, but something closer to family.
Beppe, who taught Gio to tie his shoes and now gets daily reports on planetary discoveries.
Rino, who pretends to be gruff but secretly makes sure there’s always hot chocolate ready when Gio comes in from playing.
Delphine, who’s been my anchor through everything and now sits across the table with a peace in her eyes I haven’t seen in years.
And Giovanni. My husband. The man who broke everything and spent five years trying to fix it, who learned to make breakfast and read star charts and be a father through sheer stubborn determination.
We built this. Out of a secret and a five-year war. Out of two orphans who found each other in a gallery and lost each other in a raid and somehow, impossibly, found their way back.
* * *
Later, after breakfast is cleared and Gio has been installed in the observatory with Beppe and a new book about Mars, I walk through the house.
I take my time, touching the walls I once thought I’d never see again, running my fingers along the shelves that hold Giovanni’s collection of star charts (gifts from Gio, enthusiastically selected from every bookstore we’ve visited).
I pass the study with its wall of photographs, the kitchen where Giovanni taught himself to cook, the living room where we’ve spent countless evenings reading stories about brave astronauts and adventure among the stars.
This is home.
Not because it’s safe, though it is. Not because it’s beautiful, though it is that too. But because it holds the people I love. Because every room contains some memory of the life we’re building - imperfect, complicated, ours.
I find my way to the garden and sit on the bench beneath the old oak tree. The ring is warm on my finger, his mother’s ring, the one that survived everything.
Giovanni finds me there an hour later, and he doesn’t ask what I’m doing or why I’m crying. He just sits beside me, takes my hand, and waits.
“I was thinking about everything we almost lost,” I say finally. “The years. The moments. The chance to be a family.”
“We lost five years,” Giovanni says quietly. “We can’t get those back. But we didn’t lose our future.”
“No,” I agree. “We didn’t.”
“We’re here now.” He squeezes my hand. “All three of us.”
I lean into him, and we sit in silence for a long time, watching the sun move across the garden, listening to Gio’s distant laughter from the observatory.
I look at the terracotta walls and the fairy lights and the life we’ve built out of ruins and hope, and I let myself believe it’s real.
For the first time in five years, I let myself believe we get to keep this.