“Nico,” he greets flatly.
I nod. “Cesare.”
“Good, you’re here.” He’s not looking at me but past me.
“How is he?”
He exhales, long and uneven. His fingers press briefly to his temple, as if in an effort to steady himself. When his hand falls away, it does so without its usual precision, with weariness.
“He’s sleeping,” he mumbles. “In and out. The doctors say it won’t be long.”
“Alessia—”
“She’s with him,” he cuts me off. “I…I have to…I have to go.”
He doesn’t look commanding or powerful now, just human. Just one of us.
“Okay. Are you going back to the Palazzo or?—”
“Suvereto,” he snaps and then his face twists with pain. “To wait…to…until…I get word that….”He’s gone.
He looks up at me and sighs. “Life is short, isn’t it, Niccolò?”
He rarely uses my full name. “Yes, Cesare, very short.”
“You stay with her…until….”He’s gone.
“I will.” It’s the easiest truth I’ve spoken.
“Bene. Bene.”
I watch him walk without his usual brusqueness down Matteo’s narrow entryway. And as I do, I understand something I didn’t want to before.
Cesare isn’t a monster.
He’s a man who has confused control with love for so long that he no longer knows the difference.
When Cesare is out of view, I turn and knock briefly on the door. It opens almost immediately, and Alessia flies out and hugs me.
“You’re here. You’re here,” she whispers.
I rest my face in her hair and swallow back my tears as best I can, because she needs me to be solid for her—because she’s breaking here, with me, so she can be strong when she’s with Matteo. We all have our roles in moments like this, and mine is simple: to take care of my big-hearted wife.
34
ALESSIA
Matteo dies just before dawn when the night has thinned to its last fragile hour, the dark loosening its hold as the sky outside the window begins to pale—indigo fading to ash, then to the faintest wash of rose.
It happens in the space between breaths, so gently that for a moment I think he has simply fallen deeper into sleep.
I sit beside him, my hand wrapped around his, Nico on the other side of the bed, one palm resting lightly at Matteo’s shoulder as if to anchor him to this world, to us, or maybe to comfort him, tell him that he’ll be there for those Matteo is leaving behind. For me.
Matteo’s chest rises.
And then it doesn’t.
There is no rattle. No struggle. No drama worthy of endings in books.
