Chapter Nineteen: The Villa Pt 1
1116 Words
Two months.
It had been exactly two months since Rosalina Evans had walked into the Salvatore Group headquarters with her spine straight and her heart doing something unreasonable and her best friend’s voice in her head saying just be exactly who you are.
Two months of black coffee and specific silences and four word praise delivered to the top of pages. Two months of Giorgio and his glasses and Matteo arriving unannounced with pastries and Aiden causing gentle chaos wherever he stood. Two months of learning the rhythms of the sixtieth floor until they felt, almost without her noticing, like her own.
Two months of Enzo Salvatore.
She was still deciding what to do with that last part.
Her phone rang at six forty on Tuesday morning while she was still in bed staring at the ceiling doing her usual three seconds of lying still before the day started with her.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Miss Evans.” Giorgio’s voice was its usual efficient self, unbothered by the hour. “Mr. Salvatore won’t be coming into the office today. He’ll be working from home and he needs you at the villa. Bring your laptop and the Ferrara files. Jeremy will be at your door at eight thirty.”
She sat up.
“The villa,” she said.
“Yes.”
“His villa.”
“That is the one he lives in,” Giorgio said, with the patience of a man who had answered stranger questions. “Eight thirty Miss Evans. Don’t be late.”
He ended the call.
Rosalina sat in the quiet of her bedroom for exactly five seconds.
Then she got up and went to get ready.
She had decided on dark trousers and a cream blouse — professional but not overdressed, because she was going to a man’s home and there was a version of overdressed that sent messages she had no intention of sending — when Betty appeared in her doorway with the expression of someone who had been awake for exactly long enough to be dangerous.
“Where are you going?” Betty said. “It’s Tuesday.”
“Work.”
“You’re doing your hair.”
“I always do my hair.”
“You’re doing it differently.” Betty leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded and the slow smile of a woman assembling information. “Where is work today?”
Rosalina clipped the last section of her hair into place and looked at her reflection.
“His house,” she said. In the tone of someone making a purely factual observation about weather or road conditions.
Betty’s arms unfolded.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Whose house?”
“He’s working from home. He needs files. Giorgio called.”
“ROSALINA.”
“It’s a professional visit Betty.”
“TO HIS HOUSE.”
“To his home office. Which is in his house. Which is a place where work happens.”
Betty pointed at her. “You are doing your hair differently.”
“I am doing my hair the same way I always—”
“DIFFERENTLY.”
From down the corridor Brian’s voice floated toward them with the timing of someone who had been listening since the beginning. “Just let her go Betty.”
“You stay out of this!” Betty called back. Then to Rosalina, lower: “You’re going to his house. His actual house. Where he lives. Where there is no Giorgio as a buffer and no glass wall between you and—”
“Betty.” Rosalina turned from the mirror and picked up her laptop bag. “It is work. I am going to work. At a different location.”
Betty looked at her for a long moment.
“Mm,” she said.
“That’s not a response.”
“It’s everything I need to say,” Betty said. “Text me when you get there.”
Jeremy arrived at eight twenty-eight.
He was exactly as he always was — unhurried, silver haired, with the calm face and quiet eyes of a man who had been doing this long enough that nothing surprised him. He opened the rear door of the black Mercedes the moment she stepped outside and said good morning Miss Evans with the same warm professionalism he always used and gave absolutely no indication that today was anything other than a normal Tuesday.
Rosalina appreciated this enormously.
The drive took forty minutes.
She watched Milan move past the window — the city giving way gradually to wider roads and older trees and the kind of quiet that existed on the edges of things, where the noise of the centre couldn’t quite reach. The morning light was pale and clean and did something soft to everything it touched.
She reviewed the Ferrara files on her laptop and did not think about where she was going.
She thought about it twice.
Then the gates appeared.
They were exactly as she might have imagined — iron and heavy and entirely serious about themselves, the kind of gates that said without any ambiguity that the person who lived here had decided a long time ago exactly who was and was not welcome. Security personnel stood at intervals along the perimeter — unhurried, methodical, the way men moved when vigilance was simply a habit and not a performance.
She counted four of them before the car had fully passed through the gates.
Then she counted two more along the eastern wall.
Then the villa appeared and she stopped counting.
It rose from the grounds the way old things rose — like it had always been there and simply expected the world to arrange itself accordingly. Stone walls and dark wood and high windows that caught the morning light and held it. Ivy creeping along one side. Gardens that were beautiful without trying. The kind of house that had been lived in across generations and intended to continue.
It was, in the simplest possible terms, extraordinary.
Rosalina looked at it through the window and thought about the small apartment with the two bedrooms and the third burner that didn’t work and the windows that let in more noise than light.
She thought about Brian at the kitchen table with his apple slices.
She turned back to her files.
Jeremy pulled smoothly up to the front entrance and opened her door.
“I’ll be here whenever you need me Miss Evans,” he said.
“Thank you Jeremy,” she said.
She straightened her spine — the old habit, the one she no longer noticed — picked up her laptop bag and walked to the door.
- Writer
