Chapter 10
CECILIA
It was the fifth morning I had woken in this room and I knew its sounds now the way you learned the sounds of any place you'd decided to trust -- the particular settling of the old walls in the cold, the way the heat came through the radiator in two distinct clicks before it spread, the distant sound of the kitchen starting up one floor below.
I lay in the good sheets in the early morning dark and thought about the fact that by tonight my name would be different, and found, to my own surprise, that the thought didn't frighten me the way it should have.
I had been frightened of becoming Cecelia Lombardi.
The name had sat in my future like something waiting to swallow me whole, a life that would happen to me rather than one I would live.
This was different, and I had spent enough of the night turning it over to understand why.
Constantine had given me a condition and then agreed to mine without hesitation, and those two things together had made a shape I recognized.
Not a transaction. Not a strategy. Something that had room in it for me to be a person.
I got up and dressed before anyone came to find me, because waiting in a room for things to happen to you was a habit I was done with.
Lucia was already in the kitchen when I came downstairs, which didn't surprise me.
She was a woman who ran on purpose the way other people ran on coffee, always moving, always attending to something, but she looked up when I came through the door and set down what she was doing and looked at me with an expression that was warm and specific and made my throat tighten unexpectedly.
"Good morning," she said. "How did you sleep?"
"Better than I deserved to," I said honestly.
She smiled and poured coffee without being asked and set it in front of me and sat across the island, and we drank our coffee in the comfortable quiet that had developed between us over five days in the way of women who understood each other without needing to explain themselves.
Outside the kitchen windows Chicago was gray and still, the kind of winter morning that made the inside of a warm kitchen feel like the only reasonable place to be.
"I have something I'd like to ask you," Lucia said after a while.
She set her cup down and looked at me with the expression of someone who had decided to say something and was saying it carefully.
"I know I'm not your mother. I'm not trying to be, and I wouldn't insult you by pretending otherwise.
" She paused. "But I would be honored, if you were willing, for you to wear my dress today. "
I looked at her across the island. At this woman who was the sister of the man I'd been arranged to marry, whose family's name I'd been raised to consider an enemy, who had opened her home and her kitchen and her father-in-law's afternoon to me without being asked and without making me feel the weight of any of it.
Who should by every measure of the world we lived in have sent me back out the door the morning I arrived.
I put my cup down and came around the island and wrapped my arms around her neck and held on, and felt her hands come up to my back and hold on in return, and neither of us said anything for a moment because there wasn't anything that needed saying.
"Thank you," I managed finally, against her shoulder. "That means more than I can tell you."
She patted my back firmly, the way women patted backs when they were deciding not to cry. "Enough of that," she said, pulling back and looking at me with bright eyes that she blinked once, hard. "Let's find the dress."
It was in the large closet in the master bedroom, wrapped in cloth and kept with the particular care of something that mattered.
Lucia lifted it out and held it up and I understood immediately why she'd kept it.
The lace bodice was a higher neck with long sleeves, intricate and fine, the kind of work that was a dying art even when it had been made.
The skirt was heavy satin, full and elegant, and she turned it around to show me the buttons down the back, each one covered in the same lace as the bodice.
"The lace was made in Venice," she said. "It took three months."
"Lucia." I looked at the dress and then at her. "Are you sure? This is--"
"There is nobody else," she said simply.
“I would have loved Eleanor to wear it, but that wasn’t her plan, and this dress was made to be worn on a day that mattered, and today matters.
" She hung it carefully on the rack and looked at me with a warmth that had nothing performed in it. "Let me do this."
I nodded, because I didn't trust my voice entirely.
The morning moved quickly after that, in the particular way of mornings with a fixed point at the end of them.
A woman arrived to do hair, someone Lucia trusted, quiet and efficient, and I sat in front of the mirror and watched myself be transformed incrementally from the woman who had crossed an ocean alone into something I wasn't sure I recognized but wasn't sure I minded.
My hair went up, which I hadn't expected and then couldn't imagine any other way. Small pieces left loose around my face.
When it was time for the dress, Lucia helped me into it with the practiced patience of a woman who understood that things worth doing were worth doing carefully.
The buttons up the back took time, each one, and the room was quiet while she did them, and I stood in front of the long mirror and looked at myself in her dress and thought about everything that had led to this morning and found that I couldn't reduce it to anything simple.
"Do you think he'll like it?" The question came out before I'd decided to ask it, and I felt my face warm slightly at my own transparency.
Lucia appeared behind me in the mirror, her hands coming to rest on my shoulders, and her smile was the smile of a woman who knew something she wasn't going to say directly. "I think he'll love it," she said. "And I think you already know that."
I looked at my own face in the mirror and decided not to argue with her.
Emilio knocked and opened the door and stopped when he saw me, and the expression on his face was unguarded enough that it startled a small laugh out of me.
"Stunning," he said, with the simple directness of a man who didn't bother with flattery and therefore meant it when he said something. "Everyone is ready."
I walked out of the room on Lucia's arm and down the stairs and through the hallways that I had learned over five days, past the room full of photographs and the kitchen and the door to the library where last night I had said yes in the lamplight, and into the great room that had been turned into something I hadn't expected.
Flowers everywhere, white and full, and tulle along the windows, and candles on every surface, and the whole room soft with it, intimate rather than grand.
Dante was in a large chair to the side, upright and dressed and looking better than he had any right to look, and he caught my eye and smiled and I felt something settle in my chest.
And standing at the front of the room in a tuxedo that fit him the way good things fit people they were made for, was Constantine.
He looked up when his father stopped talking and his mouth opened slightly, and he closed it, and looked at me with an expression I was keeping for myself, private and specific, not for anyone else in the room.
I walked toward him and he watched me come the whole way, and when I reached him he leaned down slightly and said quietly, "That's my mother's dress," and I nodded because my voice wasn't reliable, and he said, even more quietly, "You look beautiful," and I believed him completely.
The priest had apparently not received the memo about urgency, because he talked about love and marriage with the leisurely thoroughness of a man with nowhere else to be, and I stood beside Constantine and listened and thought that some of what he was saying was actually true, which surprised me.
"Miss Avola, would you say your vows?"
I turned to face him. He was looking at me with the focused attention he gave everything, complete and present, and I thought about the library last night and the kitchen on the first morning and the floor of his office and the car and all the small specific things I had learned about this man in five days that had somehow added up to this moment.
"I, Cecelia Angelina Avola, take you Constantine Dante Venosa, as my wedded husband," I said. My hands were shaking and he held them tighter, and I steadied. "I promise to love and cherish you as long as we shall live. I pledge my loyalty to your family and vow to honor you all my days."
He said his vows in a voice that didn't waver, looking at me the entire time, and I thought that whatever else was true about this situation, this man meant what he said, and that was not a small thing.
"I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss your bride."
We both went still. Neither of us had thought about this part, or if we had we hadn't thought about it out loud, and the moment had a quality of mutual recognition to it that I might have laughed at under different circumstances.
He moved closer and I closed my eyes and he brushed his lips against mine, barely a kiss, the most careful possible version of one, and my heart did something that had no interest in being careful at all.
The room applauded. I opened my eyes and looked up at my husband.
"Congratulations, son." Dante reached out and Constantine took his hand, and then Dante looked at me.
"Welcome to our family, Cecelia." He opened his arms and I leaned down and held him gently, this man who’d talked about everything and nothing, told me that home was the place that had room for you, and I whispered thank you against his shoulder and meant it for everything.
Lucia hugged me next, tight and warm, and then Constantine was at my elbow. "Mother, Father, I'd like a moment with Cecelia." They both nodded with expressions that were entirely too knowing, and he took my hand and led me to the library.
He closed the door and the noise of the room behind us softened to something distant, and we were in the room where last night I had said yes in the lamplight, and it was different now in ways I was still taking the measure of.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I'm fine." I looked at him in his tuxedo in the library and thought that fine was a considerable understatement but that I didn't have more precise language available at the moment. "Are you?"
"Yes." He looked at me for a moment. "I wanted to talk about tonight. About expectations. I should have done it before the ceremony but my mother was quite firm about not seeing you beforehand and I didn't want to argue with her on my wedding day."
I knew what he meant. I had been around enough of this life to know how advantageous marriages worked, what was expected and when, and I had been thinking about it with a combination of nerves and something that wasn't nerves at all, which I was finding more difficult to manage than the nerves.
"I understand what's expected," I said. "I'll agree to it. "
He looked at me with an expression that suggested he hadn't expected quite that much directness, and then before I could say anything else he pulled me down onto his lap in the reading chair, which I also hadn't expected, and I landed against him and wrapped my arms around his neck because it seemed like the most natural thing available and looked at him from very close and thought that this was a problem I had not adequately prepared for.
"God, you're gorgeous," he said, and moved his hand into my hair and directed my face toward his, and this time when he kissed me it was nothing like the careful version at the altar.
This had intention in it, and I kissed him back with everything I had been managing carefully for five days and felt him pull me closer and thought that dinner was going to be a very long wait.
We were both breathing differently when he finally pulled back, and he looked at me with dark eyes and said, "We should go back," and I nodded even though going back was the last thing I wanted to do.
"Eat fast," he said, standing and pulling me up with him, and I laughed, a real one, and let him pull me back toward the door and the noise and the candlelight and the family that was mine now, and thought that I had run from one life and landed in another and that the landing, against all reasonable expectation, felt exactly like arriving somewhere.