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She is in a red swimsuit I bought her last summer in Positano. Her curls are piled on top of her head with a bright pink clip the size of my hand that Mabel decided this morning was the correct accessory for a serious ocean expedition. Her cinnamon skin is a deeper shade than it was five years ago because she spends more time in the sun, ever since the twins were born and she decided I needed to spend more time with the family.

She is laughing.

The twins are up to their knees in water. Enzo, eldest by exactly four minutes, a fact he brings up at least twice a day, has my green eyes, and Rosalie’s smile. Mabel is quiet in public and louder than a fire alarm in private. She has Rosalie’s curls and a look, when she wants something, that has already broken every one of my closest men including Sal.

They are chasing something small and silver in the shallows.

I have been watching the three of them for the better part of the last hour. I have been asked to relax, and although I’ve become better at it over the years, the habit of working all the hours I was able to stay awake, has been hard to break.

Sandro stirs against my chest. I rest my palm flat on his small back and he settles again. His breath goes warm through the cotton of my shirt.

I have no idea where my phone is.

I have had it taken off me by my own wife twice this week. Rosalie’s smile when I ask her where it is, is the satisfied smile of a woman who has, as she pointed out a week before our holiday, negotiated for a full week with her husband’s second-in-command to make sure Vizio and its associated enterprises run themselves for five days without needing to call her husband once.

I have never taken five consecutive days off. Before this trip, we’d taken two-day, sometimes three-day short breaks.

I am on day four.

The men I have trained have, with Rosalie’s encouragement, run everything cleanly in my absence. None of them — Marco, Sal, or my second-in-command — has emailed me since I’ve been here.

I am learning to let go a little at a time.

I have been thinking about my mother more and more. Happy memories I’d buried deep with the bad, escape every now and then. Often triggered by something Rosalie or one of the kids says or does.

As I watch Rosalie with our twins, I remember a beach. I must have been around three. My mamma was in a yellow dress with her feet in the water and the hem of it darkened by the sea. She was laughing at something I did although I don’t remember what.

I am starting to think the childhood I buried was not lost. It was waiting for my soulmate to help me pull it back up into the light.

The twins see me on the deck.

“Papà!” Enzo’s voice carries clear across thirty feet of water. “Papà, come swim!”

“Papà. NOW.” That’s Mabel.

Rosalie, from behind them, catches my eye over the top of their small dark heads and lifts one eyebrow.

I shift Sandro carefully into the crook of my arm. Stand. Take the two shallow steps down off the deck into the sand.

The sand is hot under my bare feet.

I stroll down to them. Settle onto my knees in the shallows next to Rosalie, Sandro held above the waterline against my shoulder. The twins climb on me with wet, sandy hands.

“We found a crab, Papà.”

“Enzo wanted to kiss it,” Mabel says, deeply disgusted. “I told him it would bite.”

“Was she right?”

Enzo nods.

He shows me his finger. There is nothing on it.

“It’s okay now,” I say.

“But it bit me.”

“I believe you, figlio. You’re being a brave boy.”