12. Lorenzo
— ? —
Lorenzo
I bring the borrowed sweater home with me.
It lies across the chair beside our bed. Chiara let me dry off, then watched me leave from the kitchen doorway when the rain eased. My apology hadn’t entitled me to stay.
I keep seeing her face when I told her I’d believed her all along. I wanted that knowledge to comfort her.
Instead, I had given her something worse to understand. Her husband knew she was innocent and still left her to defend herself.
By morning, I have slept badly and rehearsed half a dozen things I should have said. I shower, dress, and leave the sweater folded on the chair to be washed and returned.
Before calling the investigators, I take the path behind the house toward the kitchen.
A loose corner of protective covering catches against my boot.
I stop beside the rosemary. Water has pooled beneath it, and debris blocks the narrow drainage channel. Farther along, a rose cane scrapes against the arbor where its support has come loose.
These beds looked better a week ago. I remember that much, though I couldn’t say what needs doing now.
Chiara would know.
I crouch and lift the covering out of the water.
“You’re back.”
My mother stands at the edge of the path, her coat drawn close against the cold.
“I heard your car last night,” she says. “Did you speak to her?”
“She heard me out. She still wants a divorce.”
My mother lowers her eyes. I wait for reassurance, some reason to believe Chiara will change her mind. She gives me none.
“Who takes care of these beds?” I ask.
“Chiara.”
I look up.
“She had that covering secured before she left.” My mother bends to free the edge caught beneath my boot. “The storm must have pulled it loose.”
“Since when has she been doing this?”
“Months.”
She says it so readily that I feel foolish for asking.
“After your father died, I stopped coming out here,” she continues. “We used to walk through the garden together in the evenings. For a long time, I couldn’t bear it.”
I know. I avoided his cottage for the same reason.
“When the beds began improving, I assumed someone had taken them in hand. Then I found Chiara here early one morning.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I should have.” She looks toward the house. “I should have asked whether she needed help, too. She seemed happy working here. I let that be enough.”
I rise, brushing wet soil from my fingers.
I have seen dirt beneath Chiara’s nails at breakfast. Once, she rubbed at it with the corner of her napkin while I finished reading a message. I remember her hands more clearly than anything she said that morning.
“Why didn’t she show me?”
My mother looks back at me. “Did you ever ask what she was doing?”
The answer comes too easily.
“No.”
We stand beside the damaged bed without speaking. Then she turns toward the gate.
“There’s something else.”
I follow her past the tool shed and down toward the older vines. She stops beside a narrow strip of green between the rows. Most of the plants are upright, but water and silt have flattened a patch at the lower end.
“Clover and field peas,” she says. “A trial Chiara planted.”
I crouch beside it. The strip is small enough that I could have walked its length in moments. I have passed this part of the vineyard repeatedly without stopping.
“What was she testing?”
“Something to improve the soil. She could explain it better than I can.”
Of course she could. I can almost hear the change in Chiara’s voice when a question interests her, the way she forgets to measure every word. I heard it on the lake when she spoke about her blends.
I could have heard it here.
“She brought the tools down herself,” my mother says. “Usually early, before the house was busy.”
I touch a clover leaf, then let it go.
For months, my wife has been getting out of our bed and coming here to work. I knew what time my cellar staff started. I knew which deliveries were late. I didn’t know where Chiara spent her mornings.
“She told me she missed her work.”
My mother waits.
“I knew about Lyon. What she left behind.” I look along the little strip. “I thought she would tell me if she wanted to start again.”
“Perhaps she was waiting for you to show an interest.”
I want to tell her that I did. That I listened on the boat, that I supported the launch Chiara designed. Both are true.
Neither explains why I’m standing here learning about my wife from someone else.
At the lower end of the trial, muddy water lies over the leaves. I start toward it.
“I’ll get someone to look at the damage.”
“Yes,” my mother says. “But don’t ask her to come back because the garden needs her.”
I turn.
“That isn’t why I want her back.”
“I know. Make sure she knows.”
The thought hurts because I can imagine Chiara asking it. Whether I finally see her because something needs fixing. Whether she has become worth listening to now that I’ve found another use for her.
“I wanted her home yesterday. Before I knew about any of this.”
My mother’s expression softens.
“Then you should have taken an interest while she was still here.”
There is no cruelty in her voice. I almost wish there were. It would give me something to be angry about.
Instead, I look toward the house. Our bedroom windows face this side of the estate. All those mornings, she was close enough for me to find her.
The valley accused her of not understanding our land. She knew where water collected after rain, which plants needed shelter, what might grow in this poor strip of soil.
I told Livia that Chiara didn’t understand this place. My wife had been doing work I hadn’t even bothered to ask about, and I discussed her with the certainty of a man who knew everything she lacked.
My mother touches my arm before starting back up the path. I stay beside the trial a moment longer.
I want to call Chiara and ask her about it. I want to hear her explain what she hoped would happen in spring.
But first, there is an instruction I gave the investigators that she still knows nothing about.
I leave the plants undisturbed and follow my mother toward the house.
***
Her journals are still on the nightstand.
I’ve seen them every night this week, the stack of composition books with their worn covers and dirt-marked edges.
I’ve straightened the stack after knocking it with my elbow, then set it back beside her lamp.
I assumed they were personal, the kind of private record a wife keeps that a husband doesn’t read without invitation.
I pull out my phone and send a text before I can talk myself out of it. May I look at your garden notes? I need to understand what the plants require.
The reply comes faster than I expected. They’re botanical records, not a diary. Go ahead.
I set down the phone and pick up the top notebook.
The first page is dated seven months ago, well into our marriage. Her handwriting is neat and precise, professional rather than confessional. The entry is a soil pH reading for the kitchen beds, followed by a list of amendments she planned to apply and a schedule for checking results.
Rosemary bed: water still standing at lower edge after rain. Clear outlet before changing the planting. Recheck drainage tomorrow.
I flip through the pages, watching the garden take shape in measurements and interventions.
She documented drainage improvements with sketches of the channels she cleared.
She recorded the dates she pruned the lavender and the jasmine, noting which cuts she made and why.
She tracked soil temperature, moisture levels, pest observations, and the results of every change she implemented.
This is the work of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing. Someone trained, methodical, serious about outcomes.
The second notebook covers the experimental trial in the old vineyard section.
Here she recorded the crimson clover and field pea planting in detail: seed source, planting depth, spacing, germination rates.
She photographed the soil before and after, pasted the prints into the margins, and annotated them with observations about texture and color.
The notes show the cover crop thriving through autumn and into early winter, giving her enough encouragement to keep recording the differences.
Week 12: field peas established. Compare trial strip with unplanted section after next rain. No expansion until spring observations complete.
She was building toward something. A proposal, a contribution, a way to use her expertise for the estate’s benefit. I never knew she had a plan. She never told me, and I never asked.
The third notebook is different. Mixed in with the garden records are pages of formulas: ratios of dried herbs, steeping times, blending notes.
Some entries reference suppliers in Lyon, ingredients she had shipped to continue experiments she started before we married.
The handwriting here is the same careful script, but there’s something more personal in the margins.
Adjustments based on taste. Notes about which combinations reminded her of specific places or seasons.
She didn’t stop being a botanist when she came here. She just did it quietly, without support, fitting her work into the hours when no one would notice.
I knew she had a business in Lyon. She told me what she gave up for this marriage.
I can’t pretend I needed to read these pages to know it mattered.
But I never connected that knowledge to the woman walking through our gardens at dawn, the dirt on her hands at breakfast, the notebooks on her nightstand that I straightened without reading.
I set the journals down and think about the evening I took her to the lake.
The chocolate-covered strawberries she’d loved at a market in Lyon, remembered from a conversation I’d half-forgotten having.
I brought them because I wanted to show her I paid attention, and she smiled like I’d given her something precious.