His smile sharpened slightly when my silence answered for me. “You are not nearly as unreadable as you imagine, son. The players change. The game does not.”
He turned the glass once between his fingers before setting it down. “It was not easy to protect your mother. It was not easy to build this life around her, and it is not easy now. Loving me did not suddenly make everything simple for her. There are parts of what I am she still has to see past, no matter how much she loves me.” His gaze held mine. “The bond has to be strong. Strong enough to survive the rest. And it is always harder when the woman is an outsider.” He let that settle before adding, more quietly, “That is why I pushed you toward Lucia Martelli. I wanted, for once, for something in your life to be easy.”
I stared at him. “I find the hypocrisy staggering.”
One dark brow lifted. “Hypocrisy?”
“You chose a woman from outside our world yourself.”
“I did not choose Lily,” he said, and for the first time there was something colder in his voice. “Not like that. The feelings were there, yes, but I stayed away. She witnessed something she never should have seen, and after that the choice was no longer mine alone.”
“Right,” I said. “How convenient. Yet you still kept her.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I have spent every day since making sure she had no reason to regret it.”
He sighed then and set the glass back down on his desk.
“The choice is made now,” he said. “It won’t take long for Matteo to find out, if he doesn’t already know, and then you’ll have to face him, his questions, and all the disillusionments that come after, one by one.”
“Consider me warned.”
He stood and adjusted his jacket with the same calm precision he brought to everything. “I only wanted you to be happy, but I suppose there is too much of me in you for that to come easily. Fine. Let’s go find our women before your mother organizes a wedding you haven’t even asked for.”
Yet.
The word passed through my head so clearly that I almost felt it leave my mouth.
My father looked at me for one unreadable second. “Yet.”
I hated that he knew me so well.
The winter garden sat at the back of the house under a high glass ceiling veiled faintly by the gray light of late afternoon. Even at the end of November it was green there, warm enough for life to keep insisting on itself. My mother liked to say it was the only room in the house where power forgot to posture for a while.
We found them near the far end.
Emily sat on one of the pale sofas between my mother and Victoria, a cup of tea in her hand and a look on her face I had not expected to see so soon in this house.
Ease.
Not complete, perhaps. Not unconscious. But real.
Victoria was in the middle of explaining something with all the gravity of a diplomat at peace talks, hands moving as she spoke. My mother was half listening, half smiling in that soft, amused way she had whenever my sister was winding herself up to some elaborate conclusion. And Emily,myEmily, was lookingbetween them with warmth in her eyes and her shoulders relaxed, her laugh arriving low and easy as if she had belonged in that corner of the room far longer than a single morning.
I stopped without meaning to.
For one brief second, the full weight of what I had asked of her settled in my chest with brutal clarity.
Not just to love me.
To walk toward this.
Toward my family, my name, my world, with all its beauty and all its rot so tightly knotted together that sometimes even I no longer knew where one ended and the other began.
There was no regret in me. None.
Only certainty.
She was exactly the right woman.
