18. Chiara #3
That gets further than the apology. A good day that isn’t measured by what I’ve done for his family. Could I call him just to complain about a recipe? Would he listen without waiting for the part that concerned him?
Today, I would have liked to tell him Rosalia thought my name for the blend was dreadful. I nearly did before he left.
“ My father left me a letter when he died. You’ve probably seen the folder in my study, the one with his handwriting on the cover. I read it the week after his funeral, and I’ve read it a hundred times since.
There’s one passage I’ve never been able to forget:
‘When you marry, choose your wife. Every time, especially when it is hard. Especially when others demand your loyalty. The estate can survive anything except a divided house.’
I recognize the passage before I finish reading it.
I know that letter. I read it in his study before the gala, when I was trying to understand what Ortensia had told me about his father.
The folder was sitting on his desk, and curiosity got the better of me, and I stood there in the afternoon light reading his dead father’s advice about how to be a husband.
Cesare wrote that. Lorenzo read it but when I needed him to question Livia, he acted as though choosing his wife would be an unreasonable demand.
Only now he’s putting it in this letter, admitting that his father told him exactly what to do and he failed to do it. That’s not a small thing. I returned the original to its folder after reading it. He doesn’t know I saw it. This time, he has chosen to put those words in my hands himself.
“ My father wrote that he regretted the years he spent choosing pride and work over my mother. He admitted what his silence had cost her. He told me not to make the same mistake.
I made it anyway.
I repeated it when you brought me evidence and I refused to question my own certainty. Defending Livia let me postpone admitting I was wrong. You were the one paying for that delay, and I kept expecting you to wait.
I have to stop reading. My eyes are blurring, and I can’t see the words anymore.
When did I start crying? I press the heel of my hand against my cheek and feel the wetness there, the tears I didn’t notice falling.
“ I want you to come back. Pretending I don’t would be another way of avoiding a difficult answer. But I want you to want our marriage, and I understand that I can’t decide whether you do.
I love you. I see you more clearly because I’ve finally stopped insisting I already understood.
I want to spend the rest of my life proving that I can be the husband you deserve, if you choose to share it with me.
Lorenzo ”
I sit there for a long time after I finish reading. The letter rests in my lap, three pages of his handwriting, his confession, his love laid out in ink that can’t be taken back.
I wipe my face with a tissue from the bedside box.
These tears aren’t like the ones I cried when I packed to leave. I’m not trying to find a way to explain myself to someone who won’t listen. He’s asking for a future I haven’t stopped wanting, and leaving the answer with me.
He defended me to the wine buyers before the gala. That mattered then, and it still matters, just as his silence afterward does. I can remember both without having to declare one of them false.
I think about his hands pulling me out of the water. His voice calling my name. The chair beside my hospital bed, where he sat all night because I asked him to stay.
I want him. I’ve been trying not to want him, trying to be smart and careful and self-protective, but the truth is simpler than that.
I want my husband. I want the man who made me laugh on a boat in a hidden cove, the man who remembered what I liked, the man who’s spent these past days showing me he can be better.
The divorce papers are still unsigned. The question he asked me outside the hospital is still unanswered.
Why not?
I didn’t want to answer beside a hospital car park. I wanted to be somewhere I had chosen, able to leave when I was ready. I can arrange that now. It doesn’t have to be another visit where Lorenzo asks permission to enter a room and I spend half the conversation deciding how far to let him come.
I think about the pigiatura vat that autumn evening. I was barefoot in the grapes, trying to explain measured pressure while barely keeping my balance.
Lorenzo climbed in to catch me and stayed, ruining his trousers without caring. We laughed together. I didn’t have to wonder whether he wanted to be somewhere else.
The harvest is long finished. There won’t be grapes beneath our feet tomorrow, and I don’t need to recreate that night. I want to meet him somewhere we once enjoyed each other, away from a hospital bed or a stack of evidence. I want to go there because I want him there.
I fetch my phone from the kitchen and bring it back to the room, opening our message thread, the sparse exchange from this morning when he asked if he could come by.
So I type the words before I can talk myself out of them.
Meet me at the pigiatura vat. Tomorrow at sunset.
Tomorrow, he can hear my answer to the question he asked outside the hospital. I want to see his face when I give it.
I press send.