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Her words settle in my chest. Maybe I need to think about what Lucia might be going through and the weight she’s having to bear all alone.
“How do I help her?” My voice cracks on the question. “How do I reach her when she won’t let me close?”
Sophia peers at me with sad eyes. “You can’t. Not until she’s ready. All you can do is be there consistently and reliably…without expectations. And maybe remind her why she fell for you in the first place.”
The last part sparks a desperate and probably stupid idea, and I spend the afternoon calling in favors, arranging things, and ignoring the voice that insists it won’t be enough.
By evening, I have a plan.
I find Lucia in the clinic, organizing supplies with the kind of furious focus that means she’s avoiding a conversation. As she works, her hands quick and precise, bandages stack up and instruments clink into sterile trays. She doesn’t look up when I enter.
“I’m busy, Marco.” Her no-nonsense tone is clipped.
“I know.” I approach her, pluck a box of gauze from her hands, and set it aside. “I need you to come with me. Please.”
She raises her gaze, and the exhaustion in her shadowed, red-rimmed eyes nearly breaks me. She has the hollow look of someone who hasn’t slept in days. “Marco, I can’t…”
“Just for an hour.” I catch her hand, bring it to my lips, and press a kiss to her knuckles. “Please, tesoro. Give me an hour.”
Her reluctance mixes with a yearning to believe, and she nods.
I drive her into the city, to a part of Brooklyn with brownstones lining the streets, their stoops decorated with pumpkins and chrysanthemums in orange and gold. Trees stretch toward the darkening sky, their leaves just beginning to yellow. Families walk dogs along the sidewalks, and couples lounge on front steps.
It is a serene area, the kind of neighborhood where the loudest thing you hear is a screen door closing. I know quite well this is the opposite of the world I’m in, and it’s exactly why I’m bringing her here, hoping I’ll be able to wash out the last of her fears about being with me.
“Where are we going?” she asks, her voice soft with confusion.
“You’ll see.”
I pull up in front of a small Italian restaurant with red-checkered tablecloths and candles in Chianti bottles. The sign has hung there for fifty years, and the front window is steamy from the heat of the kitchen. The owner, an old friend, greets me by clasping my hand, then leads us to a corner table with a view of the entire dining room.
“Marco, what is this?” Lucia glances around, soaking in the checked tablecloth, the candle flickering between us, and the old photographs on the walls. “What are we doing?”
“Talking.” I sit across from her, then reach for her hand. “Really talking. No interruptions, no distractions, no guards. Just us.”
She’s quiet for a moment as her gaze searches my face, then her fingers curl around my hand.
The food comes—pasta carbonara—and the owner explains that it’s his mother’s recipe from the old country that he made “specially for Santori’s lady.” Lucia laughs at his charm, and her whole face lights up. The sight loosens a knot in my chest that’s been coiled all day.
“I’m sorry,” The apology tumbles out, “for whatever I did and for whatever’s been wrong. I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head as her thumb traces patterns on my knuckles. “Marco, it’s not you. It’s…” She stops, peering down at our joined hands. “I’m scared of this life and what it’s doing to me and what it might do to…” She stops again, her throat working.
“To what?”
“Nothing.” She draws her hand back and grasps her water glass. “I’m just scared. And I don’t know how to be scared and in love at the same time.”
The words in love hit me square in the chest. She’s said it before, but it was always during a crisis, and some part of me wondered if the pressure of those situations dragged the truth out of her. There’s none of that doubt today. This moment is different, like the confession is just a simple, unguarded sentiment, and it makes it better that she offered it without condition across a checkered tablecloth and over her own pasta.
I stand and gather her into my arms. She cries against my chest, her body shaking, and I hold her right in the middle of the restaurant, not caring who sees.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur against her hair, breathing the promise into her skin. “We’ll figure it out together. I’m here when you’re ready to talk.”
After dinner, we walk hand in hand through the busy evening streets. The city hums around us, distant and irrelevant. Car horns blare from blocks away, music dances from open windows, the subway rumbles beneath our feet, and yet in this moment, there’s only us.
We return to the car, and when she falls asleep in the passenger seat, her hand loosely wrapped around mine across the console, I drive one-handed through the emptying streets.
For the first time in days, I let myself relax. When we arrive at the villa, I lift her carefully and cradle her against me. She stirs as I carry her into the apartment. When her brow furrows, I mumble assurances into her ear.
