16. Cat
— ? —
Cat
The driveway winds through woods so thick the afternoon sun barely reaches the gravel. I’m thirty-one now. I haven’t been here since I was twelve, and I’m bracing myself for collapse, rotted porch, shattered windows, Nonna’s paradise returned to the earth.
Then the trees open.
“What is this?”
Max pulls the car to a stop. “It’s yours. It was always supposed to be yours.”
“That doesn’t explain the roof. Max, what is this?”
“I found it in month two of looking for you. The property records were buried under three layers of shell companies, your grandfather was thorough, but I have good people.”
“Month two. You’ve been searching for four months.”
“Which gave me about six weeks to get the restoration done. I had crews working around the clock.”
“Six weeks? For all of this?” My voice climbs an octave.
“Money moves things quickly when you throw enough of it at the right people.” He turns off the engine. “It was in bad shape when I found it. Roof half gone, porch collapsed, water damage through most of the first floor.”
“The crews were hired by a restoration company,” he adds. “They thought I was the owner’s representative. Deliveries went through a depot. Enough people know the place exists that I won’t call it invisible, but the work was finished before anyone knew we needed somewhere to hide.”
“I remember. The last time I saw it, before the war made it too dangerous, the porch was already sagging.”
“The bones were solid, though. The foundation, the framing. Whoever built this place knew what they were doing.”
“My great-grandfather. He built it with his brothers in 1952. My grandparents bought out the other relatives when they moved up here.”
“That explains the craftsmanship. The mason I hired said he’d never seen stonework that good outside of Italy.”
I get out of the car because I can’t sit still anymore. The white clapboard gleams fresh. The porch swing hangs exactly where it used to.
“The swing,” I say. “That’s the same swing.”
“The chains were rusted through, but the seat was salvageable. I had it restored and rehung.”
“Nonna used to sit there every evening. She’d shell peas and watch the sunset and complain about my grandfather’s driving.”
“You told me that. The night you beat me at chess six times in a row.”
“You remember that?”
“I remember everything you’ve ever told me about this place, Cat. The porch swing, the pizza oven, the lemon trees she brought inside every winter.”
“The lemon trees.” I’m staring at the porch now, where young citrus trees sit in terra cotta pots. “Max, where did you find those?”
“Nursery in California that specializes in heritage citrus. The variety is the same as the ones in your grandmother’s photos. I found an album in the attic when we were clearing out the water damage.”
“She had pictures of her lemon trees?”
“She had pictures of everything. You as a baby, your mother’s wedding, your grandmother building the pizza oven. I used them as reference for the restoration.”
“The pizza oven. Is it-”
I keep finding pieces of her here, rebuilt and waiting, and each one lands somewhere soft and undefended.
“Out back. Rebuilt stone by stone using the original foundation.”
“She built that herself. Over three summers, kept changing the design. Everyone told her she was crazy.”
“She wasn’t crazy. The structure was sound, just weathered. We restored it exactly as she made it.”
The front door is solid steel behind its painted wood facade. I run my hand over the surface.
“This isn’t original.”
“Bulletproof glass in every window. Reinforced doors throughout. The perimeter fence is wired with motion sensors and cameras, backup generator in the barn, root cellar stocked for three months.”
“You turned my grandmother’s farm into a bunker.”
“I made it harder to reach you. Your brother’s men will check my arrangements too. As bunkers go, at least this one has a decent kitchen.”
I run my hand along the wall, my grandmother’s wall, remade into something armored and strange, and can’t decide whether to be furious or undone.
“Why? Why go through all of this?”
“Because I couldn’t find you. Because I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. Because rebuilding this place was the only way I could take care of you when you wouldn’t let me take care of you in person.”
“You didn’t know I’d ever come here.”
“No. But I thought, if I could make it safe, if I could make it whole again, maybe someday you’d want to. Even if you never came back to me.”
He punches a code into the keypad. The door swings open.
The kitchen stops me cold.
“Max.”
“The cabinets are new, but I had them built to match what was in the photos. That shade of green took three attempts to get right.”
“Nonna called it ‘sage from the garden.’ She mixed the paint herself because she couldn’t find the color she wanted.”
He says it like it’s nothing, like rebuilding a dead woman’s kitchen down to the drawer pulls is a thing anyone would do.
“The contractor thought I was insane, asking for seventeen different green samples.”
“Seventeen?”
“I wanted it to be right.”
I walk to the pantry door. It hangs at the same crooked angle it always has, the hinge that never sat quite right, the gap at the bottom.
“You kept it crooked.”
“You said once that the crooked door was your favorite flaw. That your grandmother refused to fix it because she said perfection was for people who didn’t understand character.”
“I said that while I was half asleep on your study floor. I didn’t think you were listening.”
“I was always listening, Cat. I was just too stupid to show you that.”
I open the pantry. Inside, the shelves are stocked, flour, sugar, canned tomatoes, olive oil.
“You stocked it like she used to.”
“I did my best. Some of the brands don’t exist anymore, but I found Italian imports that seemed close.”
“The San Marzano tomatoes. She used to say American tomatoes were an insult to sauce.”
“I remember. You told me that too, when you were teaching me to make marinara.”
“You drowned it in garlic.”
“Once. I did that once, because you were wearing that blue dress and I got distracted.”
“You deserved to be banned. That was criminal garlic abuse.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “It was one time.”
“One time too many.”
I walk through the house like I’m moving through a dream. The living room has the same layout, the same view of the hills. The bedrooms upstairs smell like lavender.
“The lavender sachets,” I say. “In the closets. She used to make them herself.”
“I found a supplier in Provence who grows the same variety. I couldn’t make them myself, but I wanted the smell to be right.”
“You found lavender suppliers in Provence. For sachets.”
“For you. Everything in this house is for you.”
By the time I make it back downstairs, I’m shaking.
“I need you to understand something,” I say. “You can’t just build a house and fix what happened.”
“I know.”
“You can’t buy your way back into my trust.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why do all of this? Why spend six weeks and God knows how much money on a place I might never see?”
“Because caring about you had to look like something, Cat. Even if you never knew about it. Even if you never came back. I had to do something with all this-” He stops, swallows. “I couldn’t just wait and hope. I had to build something.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. So I do what a Romano does with an overwhelming position.
I take command of it.
“There’s a chalkboard,” I say. “In the kitchen. Where is it?”
“Where your grandmother kept it. By the stove.”
I find it, the same old slate in its wooden frame, the surface clean now. The chalk is in the little tray.
“Here’s how this works,” I say, picking up the chalk.
He watches me write.
TERMS, I write at the top. Then underneath:
1. You sleep in the barn loft. Not the house. 2. You tell me everything that happens with the famiglia. Everything. 3. No touching without permission. 4. No secrets. Ever again.
“Those are my conditions. Non-negotiable.”
“I understand.”
He says it too fast, too easily, and somehow that’s worse. I want him to argue. Arguing I know how to win.
“You violate any one of them and I disappear so thoroughly you’ll never find me again.”
“I understand completely.”
“Good.”
I fold my arms over the swell of the belly, a barrier I know is useless against him and put up anyway.
“I have one request.”
“You can ask. Doesn’t mean I’ll grant it.”
It comes out sharper than I mean it to. He doesn’t rise to it, which is its own kind of infuriating.
“That’s all I’m asking for. One clause.”
“What is it?”
“A second chance.”
The words land in the center of my chest and detonate, quiet and total. Of course that’s what he wants. Of course he’d ask for the one thing I’ve spent months teaching myself not to give him.
“No.”
“Cat-”
“No. Absolutely not. You broke my trust, Max. Shattered it. You don’t get a second chance.”
My voice doesn’t shake. I’ve rehearsed this in the dark enough times that it comes out steady, even while everything under my ribs closes into a fist.
“Then let me earn it.”
“Earn what? After everything you did?”
“Let me earn it back. Day by day. Not because you owe me anything, but because I’m asking for the opportunity to prove I can be what you needed me to be.”
He stops himself before he says the word. Smart. It has no place in this room yet, and we both know it.
“And if you can’t?”
“Then at least you’ll know for certain.”
He holds my eyes without flinching, and I hate that I believe him. I hate more that some traitor part of me wants him to be right.
“Fine. You get your chance. But only while we’re here, only at Nonna’s farm. The second we leave, all bets are off.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
“No. That’s all you’re getting. Don’t confuse the two.”
He nods once, then walks past me into the kitchen. I watch him open cabinets, pull out pots and pans.
“What are you doing?”
“Cooking dinner. You need to eat. You’re pale and I know you didn’t have lunch.”
“You know how to cook.”
“My grandmother raised me at her stove from age four. I can make carbonara in my sleep.”
He moves through my grandmother’s kitchen like he’s already mapped it, reaching for the good pan, the one she saved for Sundays, and something behind my ribs pulls tight.
“The don of the Moretti family makes carbonara.”
“The don makes excellent carbonara. My nonna insisted I master it before she’d let me near the business. She said a man who couldn’t feed himself couldn’t be trusted with anything important.”
“Your grandmother sounds terrifying.”
“She would have loved you. Same way of looking through someone’s bullshit.”
A furious honking erupts from outside.
“What the hell is that?” Max crosses to the window.
I look. A massive gray-white goose stands in the yard, murder in its eyes.
“Cannoli.”
“The goose has a name?”
“That’s Nonna’s goose. The original. She was young when I last visited; geese can live thirty years.”
“There’s been a goose living on this property for years?”
“The caretaker Enzo paid to check on the land kept feed out by the pond after Nonna died,” I say. “Cannoli apparently declined to move.”
Max shakes his head. “The workers warned me during restoration,” he says. “They said there was a demon bird who attacked anyone who came near the pond.”
“I didn’t think she’d declare war on you specifically,” I say. “She usually just hisses at strangers and waddles away.”
Max stares at the advancing bird. “She’s not waddling away. She’s advancing. With clear hostile intent.”
Cannoli lets out another honk and charges the porch.
“She knows you’re not family,” I say. “Geese remember faces. She probably thinks you’re an invader.”
“I am an invader. But I come bearing carbonara. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Not to a goose. They don’t negotiate.”
“What do I do?”
“Don’t run. They chase if you run. Just walk slowly toward the barn and don’t make eye contact.”
Cannoli fixes him with one flat black eye from across the yard, unbothered, certain of her jurisdiction.
“Don’t make eye contact with the goose.”
“Direct eye contact is a challenge. She’ll take it personally.”
“This is insane.”
“This is farm life. You wanted to help with the heavy lifting? Cannoli is part of the heavy lifting.”
He edges toward the door. Cannoli tracks his movement with terrifying precision.
“She’s like a tiny, feathered assassin,” he says.
“She’s protecting her territory. You’d do the same thing.”
“I would not honk and flap my wings.”
“You’d do the human equivalent. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t.”
He makes it off the porch. Cannoli follows at exactly the distance required to be maximally threatening without actually attacking.
“The barn loft,” I call after him. “That’s where you’re sleeping.”
“With the homicidal goose between here and there?”
“Consider it a test of your commitment.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m a pregnant woman who’s had a very long day. I’m entitled to some entertainment.”
“All right. I’ll take my chances.”
He moves toward the barn with Cannoli in pursuit. I watch from the window as he disappears inside, the goose planting herself at the door like she’s been assigned the post.
Later, after he’s brought me a plate of carbonara that’s annoyingly perfect, after he’s made his way back to the barn through another gauntlet of honking rage, I stand in Nonna’s kitchen and look at the terms on the chalkboard.
His light comes on in the barn loft. Mine stays on in the farmhouse.
A hundred feet of dark between us.
Neither light goes out for a long time.