Married To The Don.

CHAPTER THREE: SEPARATE ROOMS

Saturday arrived the way difficult things tend to, too quickly, and with excellent weather that felt like a personal affront.

I packed two bags.

Not because two bags was the right amount for six months, but because two bags was the amount that said I am taking this seriously without surrendering to it. My good clothes, the green dress, my nursing textbooks, three of them, thick as bricks, because I hadn't decided whether I was going back to finish the degree but I wasn't making that decision by leaving them behind. My mother's photograph. The rubber-banded birthday cards from my father's desk drawer, because they were coming with me and that was not negotiable with anyone including myself.

My knife roll. Twelve knives, Japanese steel, the single extravagance I'd ever permitted myself. Anya called them my emotional support weapons. She wasn't wrong.

The car arrived at exactly nine o'clock.

The De Luca property sat at the end of a private street behind a gate that opened as we approached, which meant someone had been watching for the car before it arrived, which I filed under information rather than alarm. I was going to be doing a great deal of that.

The house itself stopped me.

Not a mansion in the grotesque sense, no columns performing Rome, no architectural insecurity. A stone manor house, Edwardian, wide and settled into its grounds with the composure of something that had been standing long enough to stop trying to impress anyone. Beautiful the way things built for permanence are beautiful. Then I registered the security cameras at the gate and corners, the three men positioned across the grounds with the stillness of people paid to notice everything, and the beauty recalibrated into something more complicated.

A woman opened the front door before we reached it. Sixties, trim, dark-eyed.

"Miss Marchetti. I'm Giulia. I run the house." She stepped back. "Come in out of the cold."

The interior was warm.The smell of woodsmoke and, underneath it, something slow-cooked drifting from the back of the house that my neglected stomach greeted with embarrassing enthusiasm.

My room was the size of my entire apartment, with a window that consumed the exterior wall and looked out over the back gardens and the city rolling toward the river. A writing desk. White linen on a bed that represented an entire philosophy of rest.

And on the nightstand, in a low glass vase: white roses.

The same as the restaurant. I stood and looked at them and felt the deliberateness of it land, not romantic, not decorative, but communicative. A consistency. He was telling me the details were intentional.

I registered it. I set my mother's photograph on the desk face-out, put the birthday cards in the nightstand drawer, unrolled my knives beside the textbooks, and went to find lunch.

I smelled the kitchen before I found it.

The woman at the stove had her back to me, small, white-haired, moving through the space with the economy of someone who had made peace long ago with exactly how much effort each thing requires. She turned before I spoke, which told me she'd heard me coming and hadn't needed to rush.

Dark eyes. Sharp, warm, missing nothing. She looked at me with an expression I couldn't immediately classify because it wasn't assessment, it was recognition. As if she'd been expecting not just a person but me specifically, and found the reality matched something she'd already been carrying.

"So," she said. Italian under the Québécois French, decades of living under that. "You're Roberto's girl."

"Elena," I said.

"I know your name." She turned back to the stove. "Come here and tell me if this needs more salt."

I crossed the kitchen without deciding to and she handed me a wooden spoon with the ease of someone who doesn't consider that you might not cook.

I tasted it. "More salt. And more time."

She made a sound of satisfaction, not surprise, confirmation, she reached for the salt, and said without looking at me: "Your father talked about you."

"Everyone keeps telling me that."

"Does it bother you?"

"It confuses me," I said honestly. "He never talked about any of this to me."

"No." She stripped parsley from stems with quick, certain fingers. "Roberto kept his troubles in separate rooms. He thought it protected the people he loved." A pause. "It's a very male way of thinking about love."

I looked at her hands and thought about my father at his desk, the rubber-banded cards, the photograph face-down in the drawer.

"How did you know him?" I asked.

She was quiet with the specific quality of someone deciding how much of an answer to give rather than searching for one.

"A long time ago," she said. "Before you were born. Before a great many things." She set the parsley down and looked at me directly. "There are things I'll tell you in time, when you've been here long enough to hear them properly. Not today."

"Is that a family policy," I said, "or a personal one?"

She looked at me for a moment.

Then she laughed, real, low, completely unguarded. The laugh of a woman who had lived long enough to find genuine amusement rather than performing it.

"Oh," she said, almost to herself. "Yes. You'll do."

I found the kitchen again at 2:47am.

I'd been watching minutes accumulate on my phone with the focused attention of someone hoping that if they observed time hard enough it would move faster. It hadn't. I pulled on a sweater and heavy socks and navigated downstairs through the settled dark, and stood at the open fridge and took stock.

Immaculately stocked. Someone had thought about what specifically rather than just quantity, good butter, eggs, fresh bread, a full herb drawer. It felt particular rather than general, and I didn't examine that feeling too closely.

I put butter in a cold pan and let the heat rise slowly, beat three eggs until the yolks and whites genuinely combined, moved the pan on and off the heat with the attention that perfect scrambled eggs require and most people deny them because they want it faster. It cannot go faster. That's the entire point.

"You couldn't sleep."

I didn't drop the spoon. I was proud of this.

Luca stood in the kitchen doorway in dark trousers and a grey shirt not fully buttoned, not dressed for company, dressed for the 3am version of himself that nobody was supposed to see. Something in his face was scoured clean by the hour. The control was still there but sitting differently, worn rather than deployed, and underneath it I caught a glimpse of something that might have been tired, that might have been alone, that closed off the moment he registered me seeing it.

"The house makes sounds," I said. "I'm still learning which ones are normal."

"All of them," he said. "This house doesn't hide anything."

I pulled the eggs off the heat. "There's enough for two."

A silence.

"Sit down," I said.

He didn't move. "Miss Marchetti—"

"We signed eleven pages together on Thursday," I said. "Elena works."

The silence stretched. Then the chair behind me moved.

I plated the eggs. Set them in front of him. Sat across from him in the dark kitchen while the city bled orange light through the window and the house held us in its quiet.

He looked at the plate. Then at me.

"You didn't make one for yourself."

"I was anxious, not hungry. There's a difference."

He picked up the fork. Ate. Said nothing for a moment.

"These are good," he said plain, unperformed, the simple delivery of a man who doesn't say things he doesn't mean.

"It's eggs," I said. "Low bar."

"You'd be surprised," he said, and kept eating.

We sat in the dark and I thought about my father at a table with this man, describing me, building a picture across five years of Sunday dinners and secrets and love expressed sideways, and whatever he had seen in both of us that made him look at one and decide the other was the answer.

"Why couldn't you sleep?" I asked.

He set the fork down, looked at the plate.

"There's always something that needs solving," he said. "It doesn't stop at night."

"And is it? Solved?"

He looked up at me across the dark kitchen and the city light caught the edge of his jaw, the thin pale line of the scar, those grey November eyes that surrendered nothing without cost.

"Not yet," he said quietly.

I didn't know, sitting in my socks in his kitchen at three in the morning, watching a man I'd married on paper eat eggs I'd made out of anxiety, whether he meant the thing keeping him awake.

Or me.