Epilogue - Sicily #3
“Would you like to go for a walk?” I pulled her ankles into my lap and allowed her to use me as a human pillow on this cold staircase.
She huffed. “I think my feet would fall off.”
I waited less than a second before I scooped her off the stairs, cradling her in one arm and letting her heels hang from the other.
She nestled into my chest as I walked us past the drinking crowds, not bothering to say another word as people whispered that we, the hosts, were leaving.
It was bad etiquette to leave your own event, but there was something I wanted Sicily to see.
The cold night breeze brushed against our skin as we stepped out, and we both instantly hummed in relief.
We had ended up responsible for so many people, and that had been our goal, but at our core, we did not always want to be responsible for anybody but one another. The times that we got to be alone were the ones we found relieving.
I kissed her freckled nose as she looked up at the tall cathedral opposite, frowning as I asked, “Do you recognize where we are?”
She paused, following each familiar ridge of the white stone church.
I could never forget this place, though at the time, I had wanted nothing more than to pretend it was not occurring.
“Not really,” she said, scrunching her nose again.
I raised a brow. “No?”
I stepped us toward it, and I hoped, as I shoved the unlocked double doors open, that she would remember, but it was not until I set her down at the start of a long aisle that it dawned on her exactly where we were.
Francesco and I had purchased her a school directly opposite where she had become my wife.
Her lip wobbled as she whispered, “I was so scared I had my eyes shut in the car on the way here. I don’t even remember anything until I reached you.”
The thought of her fear made me realize that there was a part of me still raw and vulnerable from being pushed into this marriage, but this was a key part of our past. We had both feared this and had both wanted nothing less than this, but now, she was all I craved and required.
I walked slowly down the aisle, each step following the ghost of a bride and groom who had been so scared for what their lives would look like, of what they would become to one another.
If only I could speak to them, tell them that they would feel for one another soon enough.
If only I could tell him that he would feel at all again one day soon.
“You looked like an angel,” I said, waiting for her atop the altar. “I did not have words for you then, for how intrigued I was by you, so I said you were—”
“Defiant.” She laughed, taking my hand as though we were them again.
It was dark in the cathedral, like the sun had set over that time in our life. We had given light to new parts, to new family, to us, and the sun had risen every day since.
I brushed a strand of hair behind her ear just to touch her as I should have on that day. “I was scared when we got married, but I did not truly know the meaning of being scared, not until you almost died in my arms or when I saw that video.”
“Milan,” she whispered my name, kissing my palm as though the fear could be remedied.
It could never be. I would never forget.
“I thought of this moment,” I said, looking up to the elaborate archway ceilings and breathing in the woodsy, musky scent of the church.
“You looked at me with such unfamiliarity when you were bleeding that it reminded me of this, of when you did not know me, but you held my hand and spoke to me like you did. I have never been more terrified in my entire life at both of those occasions.”
I placed a wide palm over her heart as I had done before, placing one over my own too, not honoring the Famiglia tattoo, but her love this time, as I whispered, “La mia vita appartiene a te. La mia anima a te. Il mio sangue a te. Se ti tradisco, angelo mio, amore mio, possa io essere strappato da questo mondo che è tuo, e dal mio nome che è tuo. Ti amo, eternamente.”
It was not the Omertà, but it was a vow that ran deeper than a wedding vow, deeper than the vow of my life; it was a contract between two hearts, two souls, and two worlds.
This was a contract of everything, a final acceptance to replace the uncertainty we had felt saying the vows we had not meant the first time.
Looking at her here and now, I knew with a fierce determination that there was nobody else who made forever sound too short, and I love you too weak a description for what every cell in my body was breathing.
To think that I had ever doubted myself with the love I felt for her.
To think that she had rewritten every emotion in my body and allowed them to resurface.
For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part—that is what we had said the first time, but it had been wrong.
Death would not keep me from Sicily Lucca, not when we had built this changing, unpredictable, emotional world for our forever, not when this was just the start.
You are capable, Milano.
I was capable, capable of protecting, capable of feeling, but most importantly, capable of loving.