She looks at me. The look she gives when she’s deciding whether to ask more or let it be. She lets it be, which is what I needed.
She always knows what I need.
We watch the party from the edge of it for a while—Opal and Ed in a corner having what appears to be a vigorous discussion about table centerpieces, an uncle (I think) talking to Lena’s mother with the easy body language of a man who is very good with people when he chooses to be, Alanda dancing with two of Lena’s aunts and clearly having a better time than anyone else at the event.
“Alanda’s always wanted a throuple. Maybe she’ll become an in-law.”
Lena snorts. “My aunts are in their sixties.”
“She likes a gray shag carpet. I don’t judge.”
Her laugh cuts through the music, but no one pays much attention. “This is a good life we have.”
“It is.”
I watch my wife dance with her daughter at our wedding, in a park in our neighborhood, with the people who chose to be here, and I think about what my mother would say if she could see this.
“Took you long enough.”
The women in my life are always right. It’d be annoying if I didn’t love them.
EPILOGUE
LENA
One Year Later
The villa sitsat the top of a hill outside a town so small it doesn’t appear on most maps, surrounded by lemon groves and olive terraces and a sky that does something breathtaking in the late afternoon by turning a shade of gold that makes everything it touches look like a painting of itself.
We are, technically, on our honeymoon in Tuscany.
“You know this is technically our honeymoon,” I said to Dario on the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic.
“I’m aware,” he said, without looking up from whatever he was reading.
“A year after the wedding.”
“The situation required attention.”
“The situation always requires attention.”
He looked up then. “Are you complaining?”
I thought about it. “No. I’m noting it for the record.”
“Noted,” he said, and went back to reading.
The thing is, I’m not complaining. I made my peace with the delay at the time. There are things I would have resented a year ago that I absorb differently now. Not because I’ve become passive, but because I understand what he manages and why the timing mattered, and that understanding is the difference between acceptance and surrender.
I chose this. I keep choosing it.
Opal is at home with Alanda, who is not technically a nanny but is very much functioning as one this week. I spoke to them yesterday afternoon—Opal was in the middle of something with Rainbow, the regular black cat, not the fancy one Dario thought she should have, who she considers perfect in every way—and that’s the last time I’ve called.
It’s been thirty-one hours. Not that I’m counting.
Not that each hour is its own form of torture.
The villa has thick stone walls and tile floors that stay cool even in the afternoon heat, and a terrace overlooking the lemon grove where we’ve been eating dinner every night. The lemons are the size of softballs and smell like something that should probably be made into perfume. The first evening, I stood in the grove and put my face against one and just breathed, which felt slightly insane and completely right.
