Starting with my uncle Hoka.
For years I had mocked him whenever he spoke about Aunt Violet as though one look into her eyes had rearranged the whole architecture of his life. He had once called it ikigai, and I had laughed at him for it without mercy.
Now I would have to go back and admit he was right.
My father deserved an apology too, though I suspected he would enjoy it far too much to make the experience bearable. Alessandro Benetti had crossed every conceivable line for my mother and never once looked ashamed of it. I had spent years privately regarding that kind of devotion as a form of elegant madness.
Turned out, it was hereditary.
I saw her three times since dinner. None of them should have mattered as much as they did.
The first was a study session, though calling it that suggested a degree of academic productivity that did not, in fact, occur. Emily spent the better part of two hours bent over her notes while I studied her far more than anything on the page in front of me. I was self-aware enough to understand how questionable and entirely unhidden that was, and yet I had made no attempt to stop. By the end of the afternoon I could have described every inch of her face from memory, including the tiny mole just beneath her jaw, and had already caught myself wondering how long I would have to wait before I could kiss it.
The second was breakfast. Less romantic in theory, perhaps, but no less dangerous for me. Olivero had taken up position two tables away wearing the kind of grin that ought to get him fired, while I sat across from Emily and discovered that she was even more disarming before ten in the morning, hair half tamed, coffee in hand, looking at me as though I were both suspicious and worth the risk.
The third was tonight. Another dinner. Another evening over too quickly. Another reminder that wanting her was no longer the problem.
The problem was that I was due back in Chicago for Thanksgiving, and for the first time in my life, duty had begun to feel like an interruption rather than a fact.
I had told lies about my life before without losing a moment of sleep over it. About my family. About the business. About what waited for me once Hawthorne ended. Men like me did not survive by advertising the truth. Secrecy was not just habit; it was protection. For us, yes, but also for anyone standing too close to us.
I never felt guilty about that.
Until now.
Until Emily.
Until the quiet weight of her in the passenger seat beside me, the scent of her perfume still lingering in the car, and those beautiful green eyes fixed on mine as though she already knew there was something I was not saying.
“You’re quiet,” she said at last, turning slightly in her seat to look at me properly. “That usually means one of two things. Either you’re plotting something or something’s wrong.”
I kept my hand on the steering wheel a second longer than necessary before looking at her.
“I’m going back to Chicago tomorrow.”
The words dropped between us with a weight I felt immediately.
Her face changed in that small, careful way I was already beginning to hate. Not enough for anyone else to notice, perhaps, but enough for me. A flicker of disappointment. A quick attempt to smooth it away.
“Oh.”
It should not have affected me as much as it did.
“It’s only for the break,” I said, and already the lie was forming, polished and familiar. “My father wants me home. There are things I need to help with. Expectations I can’t avoid.”
All technically true.
None of it the truth.
The words sat in my mouth like cinders.
Emily lowered her gaze to her hands. “For how long?”
“A week.”
She nodded too quickly. “That’s not so bad.”
No. Not so bad.
