15. Sicily
SICILY
I stormed out of the restaurant once the Ferraris had signed Milan’s contract, half-angry at Davide fucking Ferrari, half-angry at all men in general.
I went to rip the car door open, but Milan caught up to me, snatching my wrist into his hand with a look that told me he was analyzing again.
I knew he was confused, that he didn’t understand what he had done wrong, but even men who could feel emotions and understand anger wouldn’t get it.
“You are experiencing anger,” he stated.
I scoffed. “Obviously.”
“It is not obvious to me, Sicily. You must say it aloud for me to attempt to rectify my actions.”
He was trying, more than he had ever been willing to try.
He brought his thumb gently to my cheek, his brow furrowing at the tear breaking at his fingerprint. He didn’t understand and it was stressing him out, I could see that, but he couldn’t see that I was stressed too.
I shook my head. “It’s not—I don’t—” I groaned just as Adriano came to stand beside him, his face full of concern too. “I shouldn’t need your permission to speak, Milan!”
His hand stayed stroking my cheek as he said, “But I let you speak.”
“That’s the problem! I am my own person. Being a woman doesn’t mean I need permission from a man to speak!”
Milan’s thumb paused. He stopped analyzing like this was too much to understand.
His expression looked pained as he glanced over his shoulder at Adriano, silently pleading with him to help him understand me, and though he would never say it aloud, I knew that it killed him to have to.
Milan was proud, his entire existence as an heir had been built on power, and to ask for help was a last resort.
“Sicily’s upset because you don’t need permission to speak, so why should she just because she’s your wife and a woman?” Adriano sighed but continued, “She feels there’s inequality, rules for women and not for men, and she’s right.”
“But I let you speak out of turn against my men,” Milan said. “That’s breaking the rules.”
His lack of understanding was the same as any man, and that bothered me.
“Fuck the rules!” I shouted. “Why can’t you get this? You treat everything like you did when the Camorra attacked the wedding; you bulldoze it all and then justify it by saying you were doing it for me!”
Milan stepped away, wringing his fists together. “I am trying, Sicily! This is illogical to the way I was raised, to the way society works, so I am trying!”
‘For you’ were the silent words at the end of his sentence, but I heard them.
“And, just so we are clear,” he continued, sucking in a deep breath and holding it.
“I did torture the Camorrista who harmed you, yes, and that you cannot ask me to stop, but I had my contacts eradicate the Camorra for the better of us all; that blood is not on your name. They steal, and attack, and they do harm to everyone. You claim I do not understand your position, but you do not understand mine either. I had to cause unrest to have them taken out, I had to owe an ally which is not a good position to be in, and I risked everyone else thinking of me as unhinged just to keep us safe.”
Adriano didn’t stop Milan’s hands this time. He let, even watched, Milan’s fingers circle over and over, allowing his nails to catch against his knuckles.
I wanted to race forward and snatch them apart, to tell him it was fine, that I was grateful for what he’d done.
But it wasn’t fine.
The world wasn’t fine.
My husband took a deep breath that he didn’t release. “What do you suggest I do about this problem of inequality?” His unblinking eyes fixated on mine. “What do you want to do about it?”
What did I want to do about it? He hadn’t asked me that before, nobody had. There was so much I wanted to do, but I blurted the first thing that came to mind, the biggest, most unachievable thing so he could understand that it started right from the very start. “We could open a school.”
Anyone looking at Milan’s face would’ve assumed I’d just suggested we detonate a bomb.
“A…school?” he echoed.
The world squeezed until it shrunk around me and I was small.
“Girls can learn whatever they want, sports, or politics, or childcare. Boys can learn to be a Made Man if they want, but they can also learn languages or literature if they wish. Change starts there, with the people who will one day lead after you, with the parents who are willing to let their children play tennis.”
Milan stayed silent, but his brows furrowed, his fingers wrung, and his quietly heaving chest screamed discomfort. He didn’t like change; it overwhelmed him, and this was a change to the structure of the universe we lived in, not just to the way things were in our household now.
“Milan—”
He turned and yanked open the car door, leaving me and Adriano to stare at his empty space.
My heart beat in a way it hadn’t before, like it was failing, like I had given him a part of myself and he had walked away with it.
Adriano stepped closer, wrapping his arms around me to whisper, “Speak to Francesco about the school. He’s always wanted to do something like that, and I know he’d love to help you.”
I heard myself sniffle against his shoulder, but I hadn’t expected to cry, not over Milan. “Milan will just shut it down.”
“He won’t. I promise. Let me handle him.”
I had barely seen Milan since we’d returned home from the restaurant that afternoon, but I’d caught a glimpse of him entering two large double doors beside his office where he’d stayed, even missing dinner.
Adriano had told me to leave him, that when he was in there he didn’t want to be disturbed, and I’d accepted that, but an hour later, I was carrying a hefty bowl of fish, salad, and a random side of garlic bread that I’d found in the freezer toward the doors.
It felt like there was something to fix, or at the very least, something to take back.
Milan was lounging on a velvet couch when I entered, reading a children’s book with dragons and knights on the front. The room held floor-to-ceiling bookshelves like a library, rain-dotted stained-glass windows like a chapel, and couches like my old studio.
I tried not to gasp, but a small sound came out, and Milan looked up from his book.
“Hey.” I set the bowl onto the small wooden table beside him. I had never seen him look so disheveled, so lost in thought and time. “Are you okay?”
He nodded once but stayed silent, and that felt too heavy, so I continued, sitting quietly beside him. “What are you reading?”
“It is a child’s book,” Milan stated simply, setting the book gently into my hands.
I didn’t know what the book was about, nor why he was reading it, but I knew with so much certainty that it was important.
The pages were torn in places, yellowed with age in others, and there were passages highlighted in smudged blue ink, a second in purple, another in yellow, and a fourth in green.
“Why are you reading this?” I whispered.
“My siblings liked this book.”
My heart lurched. “Your siblings?”
He pressed his finger into the margin of a page, showing me the small, shakily written names there. Brenno, Cesare, Ezio, Siena were written against each highlighted passage.
I swallowed roughly. “Where’s your color?”
“I do not have one,” he said simply, but his eyes, those deep brown eyes, suddenly became a lot darker. “I read the book to them. Their favorite parts were my favorite parts. They made them smile. I smiled too.”
Had he raised them? Surely not, but then again, I knew next to nothing about his past other than the snippets that had been shared at the wedding, and it was obvious that they hated one another now.
Milan’s hands began to swirl over one another, wringing in that compulsive way they always did when he was overwhelmed. He didn’t stop until the tips of my fingers ghosted over his wrists, the light contact enough to bring him back.
“Why do you do that?” I asked, finally mustering the courage to ask the questions I hadn’t been brave enough to ask before.
I was scared—scared that if he told me something devastating and I reacted emotionally, it would push him over the edge of something I couldn’t catch him from and everything he’d made me feel in the last few weeks would disappear.
“I repeat my mother’s final words three times, mostly inside of my head. If I do not, I cannot move onto my next task. It…releases me.” He looked away. “I do not know when I am doing that to my hands. Adriano stops it and now you do too. Does it bother you?”
“No,” I said firmly. “No, not at all, I just—” My head burned with too many thoughts. “What happened to you, Milan?”
Milan shoved from the chair, storming across the library, then back again, his hands returning to wringing. His face was burning with the past, like my question had reimagined it into the present.
“I am not a consequence,” he spat.
I stood instantly. “I didn’t say that!”
“I am not a victim of my father’s behavior. I am not something that someone happened to!” His chest heaved. “My mother died. My sister died. My brothers were taken away. I am still here. I did not leave. I did not become ruined.”
Taken away?
“Milan—”
“You romanticize emotional connection. You believe it assists your processing when it does not. It is not logical, suffering is not meaningful, and it will not provide the context to my character you are seeking.” He turned to me, his hands tensed with the force of how hard he was holding them together and somehow, that was worse than when he wrung them.
“So what?” I shouted, regretting it instantly. “You’re just a machine? Algorithms and data? What are we then?”
He stared through me. “You are an anomaly to the data that I am familiar with. You are not supposed to understand what I do not.” He shoved a hand onto his chest. “Me. I am not something to know. I am not something to understand. I do the things I do because your emotions are data that I have to analyze, not because I want to use them for affection. You are a variable, a test subject. I allowed proximity to learn and observe. Nothing more. And besides…” Milan took a deep breath out like whatever he wanted to say next was a relief.
“You will feel a certain amount of negativity toward me when I inform you that I forced your sister to become engaged to one of the Gioffres and find your idea of the school chaotic and nonessential.”
If he’d looked hard enough, he would’ve seen the pieces of my heart scattered at his feet. I’d let myself in, and he had never opened the door. In one day, Milan had rebuilt and destroyed my hope, but I would not allow him to destroy me.