Epilogue
“MAMA. IS IT A BOY OR a girl?”
“We don’t know yet, baby.”
“Well, can you ask?”
It’s a Sunday in June, I’m four months along, and I’m sitting in a rocking chair in the yellow room while my daughter interrogates my stomach like a small tax inspector.
All four walls are yellow now. Marcello had them done in the same shade I picked out nine years ago, Dandelion—he took the old tin to the shop himself and stood at the counter until a man matched it.
The crib’s out of its box, too. It took him three hours and a great deal of Italian, while Daniele sat on the floor handing him the wrong screws on purpose.
The rabbit is on the windowsill. Rica took the price tag off it in March, on the grounds that it was “embarrassing for him.”
“If it’s a boy,” my daughter announces, “I’m teaching him poker.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Uncle Vico taught me—”
She stops. So do I.
That still happens. It happened at Easter. It happened at her school concert. Every time, one of us says something out loud instead of letting it sit.
“He did,” I agree. “You were very good at it, too.”
“I am very good at it.”
It’s always a struggle not to cry over moments like this.
I just can’t thank God enough that He’s helping my daughter process how the people we love...
can make mistakes. Bad, evil mistakes. Rica doesn’t yet know that Vico was also the mastermind behind the abduction.
Maybe one day, when she’s old enough I’ll tell her. But for now...
“Hello. I’m your sister. I’m eight.”
I just want to enjoy seeing Rica talking to her unborn sibling.
“When you come out, don’t cry at night, because Mama’s tired.”
Somewhere below us a door goes, and my whole body sits up before my brain does.
Eleven years, but it still does that.
“That’s Papa,” Rica says with enormous scorn. “You’ve gone pink.”
“I have not gone pink.”
“You’ve gone so pink. You always go pink.” She slides off the arm of the chair and makes for the door, because there’s nothing in this world she loves more than being the one to open it. “PAPA! Mama’s gone pink again!”
“Rica Bastianelli—”
“It’s not a secret, Mama. Everyone in this house knows.”
She’s gone before I can get out of the chair, which at four months I now do at roughly the speed of continental drift.
Then my husband is in the doorway with his jacket over one shoulder, his tie already off.
Eleven years. A wedding, an exile, a guesthouse kitchen, two hundred and something Saturdays in a car park.
The man leans on the doorframe of our daughter’s old nursery, rumpled and enormous and faintly amused, and my heart does exactly what it did the first time he walked into a jewellery shop and made me want to cry less than five minutes later because he’s so gorgeous, and I thought he belonged to someone else.
“Rica wasn’t lying,” he murmurs.
I’m torn. I’m really not convinced my cheeks are pink, but I also don’t want to call my baby girl a liar because she’s not.
“Tell me when you’ve made up your mind,” my husband drawls in amusement.
Argh!
This pregnancy is just...
I swear it’s made my brain function so much more slowly than usual. I feel like the old me would’ve been able to come up with something smart and funny to throw back at him ages ago, but here I am, still mentally stuck, and...huh?
“What are you looking for?”
“Where’s Rica?”
“Oh, she’s gone to Mama—”
“Good.”
He closes the door, and it’s only when I see him lock it that my admittedly slow brain finally gets it.
“We still have...” Marcello checks his watch. “Ten minutes before we meet her—”
“H-Her?” Who’s her? I swear I’ve never been the jealous type either, but oh, just the very thought of Marcello being interested in meeting another woman—
Why is my husband smirking at me like that?
“You didn’t know?”
“If you’re saying you have another woman, I swear—”
“Camillo is bringing his wife over for lunch.”
“WHAT?”
“Camillo’s married? How? Since when?”
“You can ask him later.”
“I can’t believe someone like Camillo is married, just like that. Whoever his wife is must be very special. Everyone has a crush on your eldest brother—”
“Is that so?”
His cool tone startles me into looking up, and that’s when I realize...
Oh.
It’s his turn to be unreasonably jealous, only this makes me shake my head because at least I have pregnancy hormones as an excuse, but what about—
“Did you have a crush on Camillo when you first saw him?”
“Well, I did think I was very hand—”
Uh oh.
“I was just jok—”
This is the part where I’d have just run away, but thanks to my pregnant tummy—
“I’m sorry!”
The words slip out in a breathless apology as Marcello sweeps me up in his arms.
“You should know, cara. In our world, sorry is never enough.”
He carries me back to our bedroom through the adjoining door.
“When someone does something bad, they must be punished...”
Marcello lays me down on the bed with care, but the glint in his dark eyes...
It’s enough to make me swallow.
“For a long, long time.”
There’s no chance to beg for mercy, with Marcello already covering my mouth with his, and after that...
It was, indeed, a very, very long punishment.
The End
Flip to the next page for a teaser of Camillo’s book!