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"You don't know that."

"I do."

His hands come up to my face. His thumbs catch the tears before they fall.

"You are not hard to love. You are not someone a person fails because of what's wrong with you. If your parents failed you, that's about them."

My throat closes.

"If your father dies and you don't cry, that isn't your failure either." His voice stays steady. "He had twenty-five years to be your father. Twenty-five years to show up. Twenty-five years to build that bond. If it isn't there, that's on him. Not you.”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

Being overlooked stops feeling like something that happened to you and starts feeling like something true. The sky is blue. The water is wet. Your parents don't really see you. You learn it so early that it settles into everything else, this quiet certainty that you are simply not the kind of person people stay for.

And you build everything on top of it. Every smile. Every joke. Every version of yourself you send into the room first, hoping one of them will be enough.

"My mom wanted a lawyer," I whisper. "My dad wanted a son. Or a travel buddy. Or a daughter who was less..." I wave my hand vaguely. "Less. They got me instead, and I've spent my whole life being too much of the wrong thing."

Valentino's thumb moves across my ankle bone. Slow. Deliberate. Back and forth, grounding me to the mattress, to the room, to him.

"You're not too much," he says.

"You've known me for ten years. I'm objectively too much. I talk too loud, I laugh too hard⁠—"

"Amanda." His voice drops into that low register, the one that makes my ribs vibrate. "You are not too much."

The tears come again, silent this time.

I'm already against him, but his arm tightens, drawing me closer until my face is tucked into his shoulder. His skin smells like soap from the shower and something underneath it, warm and cedar-dark, that I've been breathing in for days without naming.

"I sat at a dinner table when I was fourteen," I say into his neck. "Crying about something stupid. A school thing. I don't even remember what it was. My parents were in Geneva. The nanny was new. She didn't know me, Valentino."

His hand tightens in my hair.

"I've never told anyone that," I add. "Not Vittoria. Not anyone."

Valentino exhales through his nose, long and controlled. "Then they don't deserve the tears."

"Valentino."

"What?"

"I don't—" I stop. I don't know the word, but he waits with so much patience. "I know Vittoria has said things like that. I know she has." My fingers curl against his skin. "But hearing it from you feels different."

He doesn't move.

"I think because part of me always assumed she had to love me. She's Vittoria. She's family." My voice breaks smaller. "You don't have to."

Valentino's hand slides slowly through my hair.

"And you said it anyway." I press my face into his neck and cry harder than I have since the palazzo. Harder than I cried in the bath. Harder than when Vittoria was on the phone.

He holds me.

He doesn't say anything.

He just stays.