The center is dark at this hour, but he has a key. Of course he has a key. He funds this place. Has funded it since his father died, keeping both their visions alive even when grief made it hard to remember why anything mattered.
Inside, the lights are dimmed but the space feels alive. A waiting room with comfortable seating, a children’s play areain one corner. Artwork on the walls, donated by local artists. The faint scent of antiseptic softened by something warmer underneath. Lavender, maybe. Something chosen on purpose.
He leads me down a hallway, past exam rooms with modern equipment, past a stocked pharmacy, past a break room where the night staff’s coffee cups sit waiting for the morning shift.
We stop outside an office at the end of the hall.
The door is open. Inside: a desk, empty bookshelves, a window overlooking the parking lot. There’s a nameplate on the desk, but it’s blank. Waiting.
Three shelves on the left wall, bare. Two filing cabinets. One desk, cleared and polished, the wood grain catching the hallway light.
“This is new,” Dante says. “We’re expanding. Two more centers over the next eighteen months. Gia’s been running everything on her own, but it’s too much. The medical side, the administrative side, the fundraising. She’s burning out.”
I nod, not understanding why he’s telling me this. Why we’re here, in this unfinished office, at nine o’clock at night.
“She needs help,” he continues. “Someone to handle the foundation side. The finances. The grants. The operational planning.” He turns to face me, his eyes searching mine. “Someone who understands numbers. Who can trace patterns. Who can build something sustainable.”
My hands grip the edge of the desk. I press hard enough to feel the wood bite into my palms.
“Someone like you,tesoro.”
My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Nothing comes out.
He pulls a folder from the desk drawer. Spreads the contents across the surface: financial projections, expansion plans, grant applications.
Five columns of projected revenue. Three tiers of grant funding. An eighteen-month capital expenditure timeline withquarterly benchmarks. My eyes move across the spreadsheet before I can stop them, tracing the logic, looking for the story the figures are telling.
“I want you to be the CFO of Casa Lucia,” he says.
I stare at him. The words land somewhere behind my sternum and stay there, heavy and strange.
“You saved my family with your mind, Cassia. You traced Romano’s theft when no one else could see it. You found the patterns. You put together evidence that brought down a conspiracy thirty years in the making.” His voice is steady. Certain. “Use that mind to help others. Build something that lasts longer than either of us.”
I look down at the papers. The columns blur.
“Gia handles the medicine. You handle everything else.” He moves closer, tilts my chin up so I have to look at him. “This is yours. If you want it.”
If I want it.
He’s not offering me jewelry. Not a vacation, not a car, not any of the things wealthy husbands give their wives to show affection.
He’s offering me work. A reason to get up in the morning that belongs to me alone.
My voice breaks on the first try. I swallow. Try again. “You want me to run your mother’s foundation?”
“I want you to run it with Gia. As partners. Sisters.” His thumb traces my jaw. “She’s already excited. Said she’s been drowning in spreadsheets for years and someone in this family can rescue her.”
A laugh escapes me, shaky at the edges. “She said that?”
“Word for word. I think her exact phrase was ‘thank God someone around here can do math.’”
My vision goes liquid. I blink and the tears slide down, hot against my skin. My throat locks. I can’t swallow around it, can’t breathe through it.
“Why?” I manage.
He looks at me like the question doesn’t make sense.
“Why what?”
