In Paris that night, we check into a very fancy boutique hotel in Le Marais, our room painted in stormy blue, the bed a small continent.
We sleep like the dead that night after we make love until we’re exhausted.
The next day—before an Alighieri jet flies us back to Florence and the real world—becomes a private calendar as we play tourist, walking past thebouquinisteson the Seine, and having a long lunch in a Parisian bistro in St. Germain-Pres.
Right before we head to the private terminal at Charles de Gaulle, we stand on Pont Neuf, the river a molten ribbon below. The city rolls out before us, every streetlamp a beating heart.
She turns to me, her breath clouding in the cold.
“You know what I want?” she asks.
“Tell me.”
“I want us to be the story people who know us envy—where they say, ‘Can you believe they made it through?’ Not because it was easy, but because we didn’t lie to ourselves about the cost.”
“Then let’s,” I say, and she takes my hand, nods with a smile, sealing our bond once again.
41
ALESSIA
I leave Nico in Florence.
He doesn’t like it, but I don’t give him much of a choice.
Toni has gone back to school in Milan, so I don’t have to make excuses to her. And since Alba is on a plane to Sydney, I don’t have to tell her what I have planned, either.
This is a journey meant to unfold unseen, a path from which I would never want rescuers.
I talk to Matteo.
Obviously, in my head.
He agrees with me. He’s dead, so what the hell else is he going to do?
ButI know he’d see the sense in what I’m doing. Matteo and Papà’s relationship was based on mutual respect—but there was also love. That didn’t mean they agreed on everything, but they did trust that each one was coming from a place of their truth.
I want to surprise Papà, which isn’t difficult since I know everyone who knows him—especially the staff.
He isn’t in the Palazzo or his favorite Suvereto.
He’s withdrawn to Poppi, to the old castle in the Casentino, where men like my father go when they want to feel history pressing at their backs instead of the present at their throats.
The fortress rises from the hill like a judgment.
Grey stone, scarred by centuries of wind and siege, its walls so thick they swallow sound whole. Narrow roads coil upward toward the gate, forcing even the smallest cars to creep forward, as if the place itself demands deference.
Dante once walked these corridors in exile.
Kings and counts plotted here.
Iron balconies jut from shuttered windows, vines spilling over rusted railings like silent offerings to memory and time.
Inside, the restoration stopped just short of warmth—here lies a husk of grandeur, all echoing corridors where each footstep reverberates, drafty archways that sigh with every gust, and courtyards so still they swallow your breath.
The drive to it skirts vineyards dewy with dawn, olive groves light with winter, and languid hills lined with cypress sentinels.
My heart hammers against my ribs, a restless percussion—then, gradually, my nerves cool into a blade-sharp focus.
