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Beloved wife and mother.
I was not even five when she died. Maybe I shouldn’t have been this obsessed with her. Alessio was definitely not. He took Pippa as our mother. I did too. She raised me more than Rosetta did. Unlike Alessio, I even called Pippa “mom.” Yet, I was the one who still visited Rosetta’s grave.
I didn’t know if I missed her or if I missed the version of myself from when she was still alive. Dad visited the grave almost every week because he missed her. He was still in love with Rosetta. I, on the other hand, came to talk to her.
She died and took my feelings with her. I was not weird before her death. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that.
Regardless of everything coming to her grave made me feel too much. It was the only place I could reach my emotions. It was probably because my emotions were lying on the ground with my deceased mother’s corpse.
Coming here was the only illogical thing I still did in life. I didn’t plan on stopping.
“I am planning to get married,” I said, sitting on the grass. “I wonder if you are shocked too. Alessio and Salvatore definitely were. I don’t know why. I need to create offsprings after all.”
In my mind, I could see her laugh at that. She was a woman who married for love. She was always so full of it. Love for Father and Alessio and me. She had so much of it. For me, marriage was not going to mean what it meant for her.
“If you were alive, maybe I would marry for love. If I still had the ability, I would want that. But I am capable of deciding by only depending on logic.”
Marriage is not logic, Antonio, she would say. She would be wrong. It was nothing but logic. I needed a woman who I could take to events and have children. Actually, I needed someone who also had so much love to spare so she could be a good mother to our children, but that also meant she would have some love for me too. I didn’t want someone to give me love only to be left empty-handed. Because I was not able to give that back.
I have told people I love them many times in my life. I told it a few times to my dad and Alessio. I told it to Pippa when she got too emotional. I told that to Mia every time we were saying goodbye, either in person or on the phone.
They knew what it meant for me. I was not sure a wife was going to be satisfied with that kind of love from me.
Most women would be happy with a logical marriage in the Outfit. I was not violent towards family, and even though we needed to sleep together in order to have children, I didn’t think it was a big burden to sleep with me. I was a controlled man so I would not hurt my partner, and I was good at satisfying a woman. It was something I really enjoyed. Seeing pleasure and lust in other people fueled mine more. Intense emotions mesmerized me, so I always tried to push them to intensify pleasure in bed.
I was a good catch. I only needed a woman who was going to understand the nature of our agreement. A woman who was older than at least eighteen. Not one of those children many men offered me.
“How am I going to find her?” I asked. I hated it when I didn’t have control over a situation, and this was it.
You will know when you see her,I imagined Rosetta saying.
I couldn’t help but smile. That was not what I meant, and that was not the answer I wanted, but that was the only answer she was going to give me.
Maybe I could hope for her to be right even though how stupid and illogical it was.
After my grave visit, I had a meeting with Salvatore. He knew about my routine and respected it. That’s why we were having the meeting at night even though he said he had news for me.
I went into his office at Vista. He used to use his office in Zest, but Mia really didn’t like that since Zest was a strip club. Salvatore was doing everything that would make Mia happy. I liked that about him. I was sure he was going to hurt my little sister when they got married, but luckily that was not the case about their marriage at all. Actually, I have never seen Mia happier. Seeing that emotion in someone I cared about made it even more beautiful.
I enjoyed watching her happiness.
When I got into the office, I saw Salvatore, Alessio, and my dad sitting together. My brows came together as I took my seat. “What is Alessio doing here?” He didn’t always join us since he was still an heir.
They didn’t linger around my lack of greeting. Instead, Alessio let out a groan and said, “I have been asking the same thing.” He tapped his watch. “I am missing bath time, for fuck’s sake.”
My eyes fluttered; it was something I did when I was at a loss of understanding one’s emotions or words. Salvatore, on the other hand, only smiled with amusement. “You can take a bath anytime, Al.”
Alessio gave him a deadly look. “Not mine! It is Clara’s bath time. I love giving her baths. She smiles so much.” His eyes softened impossibly. I saw that look a lot from him growing up. Every time he looked at Isabella, he would get it. Now he also got it for his daughter.
“Bella gets to enjoy it alone then,” Salvatore said. He still had that amused look on his face. My father was also smiling.
Alessio shook his head. “Fucking lucky.”
I couldn’t understand his emotions now. He seemed a little angry. I never saw him angry at Isabella. “Are you mad at your wife because she gets to bathe your daughter?”
He looked at me like it was weird of me to not understand. “She is way too cute, Antonio.”
She was a beautiful baby. Beauty was a personalized concept, and it was also weird for me. I didn’t get fascinated by things, so my understanding of beauty was about aesthetic and generalized beauty standards. That was the reason I usually dated women who looked like runway models. They were supposed to be the peak of beauty, according to the media.
