We still have a lot of problems to face and bone of them disappear because of one conversation at four in the morning. I know that. I have lived too long inside my father’s particular brand of patient, methodical cruelty to believe one good night undoes the danger he represents.
But I understand it now, sitting here and watching Valentino carry our son back toward his bedroom. He moves with the careful, reverent attention of a man who has finally been given something he didn’t know he was allowed to want. Whatever comes next—Dante, the company, every battle still ahead of us—doesn't matter.
This moment, right here, is the one that actually does.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
VALENTINO
I carry Nico back to his bed and stay a moment longer than necessary, watching his breathing settle into the slow, even rhythm of real sleep before I let myself leave the doorway. There’s a small nightlight plugged into the wall socket near his dresser, shaped like a moon, throwing soft light across a room scattered with toy cars and a single, well-loved stuffed dinosaur missing one button eye. I notice these details the way I notice everything, cataloguing them without meaning to, except tonight it isn’t tactical. It’s something closer to hunger, the hunger of a man trying to memorize four years he can never get back through the small, accumulated evidence of a life he’s only just been allowed to enter.
When I return to the living room, Livia is sitting exactly where I left her, knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, watching me with a raw expression, she looks like someone that’s been stripped of their usual careful armor.
“He went down easily,” I say, settling back onto the sofa, leaving more space between us than I want to.
“He always does, after he’s checked that everyone’s okay.” She says it quietly, almost to herself. “He’s been doing that since he was two. Some kind of internal radar for whether the adults in the room are actually fine or just pretending.”
“He didn’t get that from me.”
“No,” she agrees, and something almost like a smile moves across her face, brief and exhausted. “That one’s mine.”
We sit in the lamp-lit quiet for a moment, the apartment settling around us, Piper’s steady breathing audible faintly from the den. I am aware of how close Livia is. Close enough that I could reach her in a single motion. Far enough that the distance still feels like a choice either of us could close or maintain.
“Tell me about Venice,” I say. “What do you remember? I want to know if it’s the same thing I’ve been carrying for five years.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, looking at her hands.
“I remember the mask first,” she says finally. “Ivory and gold, with this absurd, beautiful detail along the edges, like something out of a painting. I remember thinking the entire night felt like stepping into someone else’s life, someone braver than I usually let myself be. And then I remember you. Tall, before I even saw your face properly. The way you didn’t introduce yourself, didn’t ask my name right away, just looked at me like I was the only interesting thing in a room full of extremely wealthy, extremely boring people.”
“You were.”
“I didn’t know that yet. I just knew I didn’t want the night to end.” She looks up at me. “I remember the library. The way moonlight came through those enormous windows, and how quiet it got once we were away from the music, like the whole world had narrowed down to just that room. I remember thinking I had never told a stranger so much true information about myself in one night, and I remember not caring, because some part of me understood it would never be relevant past midnight. Whoever you were beneath that mask, you weren’t going to follow me into Monday morning.”
“I wanted to.”
I watch her expression closely, registering the slight shock on her face
“I looked for you,” I continue, before I lose the nerve. “After. I had people I trust discreetly inquire about the masquerade’s attendee list, which the Society guards more carefully than most governments guard state secrets. I got nothing. A description that matched a hundred women in that room. I told myself, eventually, that you’d chosen to disappear, and that chasing a woman who chose anonymity was its own kind of disrespect. I stopped looking because I convinced myself stopping was the respectful thing to do.”
“I thought the same thing about you,” she says, and her voice catches slightly. “I told myself you’d simply gone back to whatever life you actually lived, the one with a name and a schedule and people who expected things from you, and that the night had been exactly as temporary as we both agreed it would be. I didn’t let myself grieve it properly, because grieving something you chose felt indulgent. And then I found out I was pregnant, and grief stopped being optional.”
We assumed the worst for five years, both of us, independently, neither of us aware the other was doing the exact same thing.
“I never forgot you,” I say. “I want you to know that clearly, regardless of everything else. I have had five years of relationships that ended quickly, for reasons I told myself were practical, and the truth underneath all of it is that none of them were you. I didn’t know your name. I knew the exact sound of your laugh, the way you tilted your head when you were considering whether to trust me with the truth. I built an entire private museum in my mind out of one night, and I never oncetold anyone, because saying it out loud made it sound like the kind of obsession a rational man doesn’t admit to.”
I think of the women I dated in the years since Venice—brief, controlled arrangements that never asked more of me than I was willing to give. Each one ended the exact same way. It was always polite and predictable, done the moment I sensed they wanted something I wasn’t capable of offering. I never once told any of them why. I barely admitted it to myself, the irrational loyalty I’d developed toward a stranger I’d spent a single night with, a woman whose actual name I didn’t learn until four years and one accidental coffee spill later. Even saying it out loud now, in this small lamp-lit room, feels insane.
“I remembered your tattoo,” she says, quiet, almost like a confession. “Every time Nico did something that reminded me of a man I couldn’t name. The exact way he tilts his head when he’s deciding whether to trust something. The way he goes still right before he says the truth, the same stillness I remembered from a library in Venice. I used to trace the shape of your tattoo from memory, late at night, when I missed you. I told myself I was being foolish. I did it anyway.”
The space between us has closed without either of us realizing, and I’m not certain who moves first, only that her hand finds mine, and mine finds her jaw.
“I know you now,” I say, against her mouth, and I mean it more than she'll ever know. “Not the mask. Not the mystery. You. All four years of three a.m. feedings and grocery store tears and songs sung in the same order every night. I know you, Livia.”
“Valentino—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, before she can finish whatever uncertain thing she was about to say. “Not tonight. Not after tonight.”
The kiss that follows is slower than the hallway, slower than the cottage, deliberate in a way that has nothing left to prove.
