18. Max #2
“I thought you were the smartest person in any room I put you in, and I was terrified that if I let you too close to the war, you’d become a target.” I slide the phone into my pocket. “I was wrong about how to handle that. I wasn’t wrong about how smart you are.”
She doesn’t respond to that. Just turns back to her laptop, lifting the screen like she’s about to return to work.
My phone buzzes.
I glance at the screen and feel my jaw tighten. Marcella. The fourth time this week she’s tried to reach me, despite the fact that I haven’t answered a single call or message since I found Cat.
“Who is it?” Cat asks without looking up.
“Marcella. I should have said that immediately.”
“What does she want?”
I hold up the phone so she can see the name on the screen. Her expression goes carefully blank.
“You should probably answer that. She might have information about her father’s plans.”
“I’m not interested in anything she has to say.” I pull up the contact settings, navigate to the block option, and tap it. “There. Done.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Max-”
“There’s nothing between me and Marcella.
There never was. She’s been chasing something that doesn’t exist since we were teenagers, and I should have shut it down years ago.
” I set the phone on the desk, face down.
“I can’t go back and fix how I handled it before. But I can make sure it’s clear now.”
Cat is quiet for a moment. Then: “She’s going to be furious.”
“Good. Furious people make mistakes.”
“Furious people also escalate.”
“You’re right. I care what she does next. Nico will keep the messages she sends to the house; she doesn’t get a private line to me anymore.” I pull out the chair across from her desk and sit down. “What are you working on?”
“Nice subject change.”
“I’m a master of conversational maneuvering. What are you working on?”
“Before you maneuver anywhere,” Cat says, “I want the names of everyone with access to the farm. Including the people you trust.”
My first instinct is to tell her the list has already been checked. I hear the old answer in my head and leave it there. “I’ll bring it over.”
“And Enzo checks it against his list. If something doesn’t match, we change it. Even if it’s one of your people.”
“Even then.” The words cost less than I expected. Her shoulders ease. We spend the next half hour with the names between us. When we finish, I nod toward her laptop. “Now, what were you working on?”
She eyes me suspiciously. “A book.”
“I gathered that from the laptop and the typing. What kind of book?”
“The kind that pays my bills and funds my independence. Why?”
“Because I’m curious. Because we’re stuck on this farm together for the foreseeable future, and I know almost nothing about what you actually do all day. Because I’m trying to have a normal conversation with my wife and she’s looking at me like I’m about to steal her lunch money.”
“You’re not exactly a normal-conversation kind of person.”
“I’m trying new things. Expanding my horizons.” I lean back in the chair. “Humor me. What’s the book about?”
Cat hesitates, then slowly opens the laptop. She angles the screen away from me, but her posture is less defensive than before.
“Romance,” she says. “Contemporary romance with, uh, complicated family dynamics.”
“Complicated how?”
“Organized crime complicated. Power dynamics, loyalty conflicts, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“All fiction is autobiographical to some degree. That’s what my writing professor used to say.” She’s typing something now, not looking at me. “This one’s about a woman who has to decide whether the man she married is worth trusting again after he broke her heart.”
“How does it end?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“What are the options?” I ask, leaning in.
“Either she forgives him and they build something real, or she walks away and builds something better on her own.”
“Those both sound like valid endings.”
“They are. That’s why I haven’t decided.” She glances up at me. “Why are you so interested?”
“Because I want to know how you think. Because I spent six months locked in a study instead of learning the person I married. Because you’re brilliant and I never told you that enough.” I stand, pushing the chair back. “Can I see?”
“See what?”
“What you’re working on. Just one page. I’ll read one paragraph and then leave you alone.”
She laughs, but there’s something nervous in it. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s unfinished. Because it’s rough. Because some of it is…” She trails off, color rising in her cheeks.
“Some of it is what?”
“Personal. Intimate. Not meant for outside eyes yet.”
“I’m not outside. I’m your husband.”
“You’re my husband who I’m not sure I trust yet. The second half matters.”
“Noted.” I move toward the door, then pause and glance back over my shoulder. “But for what it’s worth, whatever you’re writing, however it ends, I hope the guy in your book figures out how to be worthy of her. I hope he does the work and earns it back.”
“That’s very romantic of you.”
“I have my moments.”
I’m almost out the door when she sighs.
“Fine,” she mutters, and turns the laptop a few degrees toward me. “One paragraph. Then you leave me alone.”
I lean over her shoulder to read, close enough that she goes still under me, and the line waiting on the screen is not the tame one she thinks she pulled up:
He worked two fingers into her, slow, and when his mouth closed over her clit she gave up pretending she had ever wanted anything else.
The smile that spreads across my face is slow and entirely too pleased with itself.
“That’s the paragraph you picked.”
“I didn’t-” She reads what’s actually on the screen, and the color drains and then floods right back into her face as she slams the laptop shut hard enough to rattle the desk. “That was the wrong one. I meant to scroll to a different-”
“I liked that one.” I brace a hand on the back of her chair and drop my voice near her ear. “Read me the next part.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Is it his hands, or his mouth again?” The flush climbs her throat and keeps going, all the way to the tips of her ears. “You write it like you’ve given it a lot of thought. In detail.”
“Get out of my office, Massimo.”
“His mouth again, then.” I straighten before she can reach the stapler, thoroughly satisfied with the shade of red she’s turned. “For the record, the fictional man in that scene is a very lucky bastard.”
“OUT.”
I leave, closing the door gently behind me. The smile stays on my face all the way across the yard, past Cannoli’s aggressive patrol, up the stairs to the barn loft.
I sit on the top step and look out at the farmhouse, at the window where I can see her shadow moving behind the curtains.
Patience. That’s what this requires. Not grand gestures, not dramatic declarations, patience. The slow, steady work of proving I can be trusted again. The daily accumulation of small moments that might, eventually, add up to something bigger.
She has ideas. Sharp ones. She’s writing stories about forgiveness and second chances. She’s wearing my flannel and she hasn’t given it back.
It’s not much. But it’s more than I had a week ago.
I lean against the railing and watch her window until the light goes off.
Patience as strategy. Earn it.