Chapter 3 #2
It’s embarrassing enough that he wants to know about my non-existent marital sex life, and now he wants to talk about my husband’s mistress? Talk about mortifying!
“Your father—”
“Is good at treating me like a vine he can prune into obedience.” It’s pure and simple emotional blackmail, but I know this will make him back off when I add, “You are supposed to be different.”
“Cara.” His expression softens. “I will talk to Nico.”
I arch an eyebrow. “And what will you say? Oh, Niccolò, could you go have sex with your wife instead of your mistress?”
He gives me a pained look.
I lean closer. “How about this, Matteo? You worry about what’s fermenting in your cellar. I’ll handle what’s fermenting in mine.”
His eyes flick down to my clothes—old jeans, a thin cotton shirt already sweat-damp at the spine, boots scuffed and dusty. “You need to get ready.”
“I need a shower.”
“I think….”
“I am not competing with the likes of Chiara Jossa,” I grit out.
Guilt, along with the August heat, makes him flush. “Cara, I never—"
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll get ready when I’m done with the merlot.”
“Matteo,” I hear Lucia call out.
She’s such a Mama Bear! She can see we’re both getting flustered so she wants to provide respite.
“What?”
She gives Matteo a look that is a blend of concern and anger she usually saves for broken equipment and stupid men who drive tractors too fast. “Leave her alone.”
“Her husband will be there,” Matteo tells Lucia, as if she doesn’t know.
“Husband?” she scoffs.
The word husband feels foreign, like a label placed on a bottle that contains something else entirely.
“He lives at the Palazzo Alighieri, so yes, he’ll be there,” I interject.
Lucia makes a soft noise that could be a grunt or a prayer. “Maybe you can talk to him about discretion.”
“Or maybe”—I pause for effect, first looking Matteo in the eye and then Lucia—“you both can shut the fuck up.”
Matteo, Lucia, and Edam are some of the few people, besides family, who know the truth behind my marriage—know that I’m Nico’s wife in name and inconvenience only.
They know the marriage has not been consummated, and that I have slept alone every night since I became Mrs. Alarico, listening to the modern villa at Tenuta Pietra Alta settle around me as a body exhales, while the estate’s dogs bark at shadows and the sea wind worries the shutters.
It’s humiliating in a way I can’t explain without sounding foolish—as if I’m a silly girl who thought marriage meant something other than a stamp and a signature.
I am twenty-nine years old. I run fermentation trials. I can taste a blind lineup and identify vineyard blocks by soil. I have managed harvest crews through brutal heat, keeping them moving by sheer will.
And still, a part of me wakes up at night and thinks, “What did I do wrong?"
The answer comes fast and cold: You exist in a world run by men, and you bartered the best you could.
Matteo watches me for a moment and then on a sigh says, “I have to go to Castello di Monteserra before heading to Florence.”
I nod. “I’ll see you tonight, then.”
He nods, mutters something I can’t hear, and, with a wave of his hand, leaves.
“Alessia,” Edam yells as he waves at me from the far end. “The cab block is showing botrytis.”
I let out a laugh. “This time of the year?”
Lucia rolls her eyes. “He’s so dramatic!”
“I’ll take a look.”
I go toward the small rise where the vineyard meets the stone.
From here, you can see the whole estate—the main farmhouse with its pale walls and green shutters, the newer cellar building tucked behind it, half-hidden by cypress trees.
Beyond that, the land rolls down toward the flatter coastal plains, and the faint blue stripe of the sea lies like a promise at the horizon.
I walk toward the parcel where we’re growing the cabernet sauvignon, the vines still young enough to look almost fragile against the Bolgheri light.
As I start back down the slope, my phone vibrates in my pocket again.
For a stupid, hopeful second, my body reacts, wondering if it’s him—if maybe he remembered his wife exists in Bolgheri, surrounded by grapes and silence.
I pull out the phone.
Alba: I have sent something over. Wear it.
I smile. My sister, the fashionista, always trying to dress me up because she knows I won’t…mostly because I don’t know how to. I’m grateful that she cares—grateful that she’s putting in an effort.
Another beep follows, and she continues: I wish I could be there, but I’m stuck here in Rome with a crisis. We need a new chef at Pietra Nera!
Pietra Nera, Black Stone, is one of our Michelin-starred restaurants near Piazza di Spagna. It is Alba’s baby as she built it from scratch and concept, and within a year of existence, it had already won a Michelin star. I’m so proud of her.
I use the voice function to send her a message: Don’t worry. I’ll somehow survive without you tonight.
I slide the phone back into my pocket and return to the rows, my mind on so much more than the vines that I don’t care about tonight.
But I do.
I’m nervous to see my husband for the first time since we married.
I look down at my hands.
Stained.
Nicked.
Not soft.
Not elegant.
Not the hands of the women in magazines my mother used to save—the wives of men like my father, smiling on balconies in silk, as if their lives were just a string of beautiful days.
My mother is gone. The women in those magazines look like ghosts to me now.
I never worried about how I looked until…Nico.
You see, shine doesn’t keep vineyards alive; talent, skill, and dedication do.
Matteo tells me I’m not na?ve about wine, only about power. He says that one day I’ll succeed him as head winemaker, but that it will require me not to allow them—by which he means my father and his kind, a group that now includes Nico—to make me small.
The truth is, I don’t need their help. I make myself small perfectly well on my own.