In Love With My Ex's Cousin

CHAPTER TWELVE

Luca

Sunday arrived the way family obligations always did: already decided.

Luca dressed without rushing. Dark trousers. A shirt his aunt would consider acceptable. No tie. A watch he had owned for years. The driver confirmed the time at four-ten. By four-thirty the car was moving north of the river, away from the empty apartment and toward a house that had never been empty in his lifetime.

Matteo’s mother lived in the same stone place she had lived in since before Luca was old enough to understand that dinners were not only meals. The driveway was already lined. Adrian’s car was there. Matteo’s was closer to the steps, parked as if the house still opened first for him.

Adrian met him in the entrance hall.

“You’re on time,” Adrian said.

“So are you.”

“That’s new for both of us.” Adrian lowered his voice. “She asked if you were eating enough. I said yes. Don’t make a liar of me in the first ten minutes.”

Luca handed his coat to the housekeeper and followed the sound of conversation toward the dining room.

The table was already set. Too many glasses. White flowers that had been arranged by someone who understood what this family considered enough. Matteo’s mother stood at the sideboard and turned when he came in, elegant in the way women in this family were elegant: as if appearance were a form of order.

“Luca.” She kissed his cheek, then held his face a second longer than necessary. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s what men say when they have not been fine for months. Sit. Eat. Don’t disappear into a corner with your brother and call it conversation.”

Matteo came in from the terrace with a bottle in one hand and the same easy smile he wore for rooms he expected to like him.

“He came,” Matteo said. “Mark the calendar.”

“I said I would.”

“You say a lot of things.” Matteo clapped his shoulder, light, familiar, already moving on. “Mother, he needs wine before he starts answering questions in single syllables.”

“He needs food,” she said. “Wine after.”

They sat.

The first half hour was harmless. The summer house in October. A neighbor who had sold too quickly. A cousin’s engagement that everyone agreed was sensible and no one sounded excited about. Luca ate. He answered when spoken to. He let Matteo fill the spaces that would otherwise have required him to perform warmth.

It was Adrian who nearly made the evening less simple.

“How is the new place?” he asked, too casually, cutting into lamb.

Matteo looked up. “What new place?”

Luca wiped his mouth. “I bought an apartment on the river.”

Matteo’s eyebrows rose. “When?”

“Six weeks ago.”

“And I’m hearing it now?” Matteo sat back, offended in the theatrical way he used when he wanted the table on his side. “You didn’t think to mention it?”

“There was nothing to mention. It’s empty.”

“Empty.” Matteo grinned. “Of course it is. You bought a home and refused to live in it. That is the most Luca sentence I have heard all year.”

Their hostess set her glass down. “Who is doing the work?”

The question was ordinary. In another family it would have passed.

Luca kept his voice even. “A designer from a residential firm. The work has only started.”

“Which firm?” Matteo asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Adrian did not look at him. That, more than the question, told Luca the line had been close enough.

Matteo’s mother studied him across the flowers. “You should have someone who understands how you live. Not someone who understands how a magazine thinks you live.”

“I have that,” Luca said.

Matteo laughed. “He has that. Listen to him. Next he will tell us he has friends.”

The table moved on. It always did, once Matteo had turned a moment into a joke. The designer’s name stayed off the cloth. The history stayed off it too. Luca drank water and let the conversation go toward October and the summer house and whether the boat needed work before then.

After dinner they stood in the sitting room with coffee. Matteo’s mother asked Luca whether he intended to host anything in the new apartment.

“No.”

“Not even family?”

“Not yet.”

She accepted that with a look that said she had not finished with the subject, only postponed it. Matteo was already on his phone, arranging something for later that had nothing to do with anyone in the room.

Adrian found Luca near the window.

“You handled it,” Adrian said quietly.

“There was nothing to handle.”

“There was a name you didn’t say. That’s handling.”

Luca watched the garden lights beyond the glass. “Sunday dinner is not the place.”

“No,” Adrian said. “But it will be a place eventually. You should decide what you want that conversation to sound like before Matteo decides it for you.”

Luca did not answer.

He left at nine-forty, early enough to be noticed and late enough not to be accused of fleeing. In the car he loosened his collar and looked at his phone. No message from Elena. He had not expected one. Monday was window treatments. That was the next point on the calendar that belonged to the apartment.

The rest of Sunday belonged to the family table he had just left: a bought apartment now public, a designer still unnamed, a cousin who laughed too quickly when he felt excluded.

Luca put the phone away.

He had told the truth.

He had not told all of it.

For tonight, that distinction still held.