Chapter 10

The house sat above a curve of coastline Blair hadn't known existed, gates swinging open before the car had even fully stopped, warm light spilling out from every downstairs window like the place had been expecting company for hours.

It hadn't, as it turned out.

"You couldn't call ahead?" The woman who opened the door before Alessandro reached it was small, silver-haired, and entirely unbothered by the hour. "I would have made something better than leftovers."

"Mamma, this is—"

"I know who she is." Nicoletta's eyes moved over Blair once, quick and assessing in a way that felt nothing like her son's version of the same thing. "The whole town knows who she is by now, tesoro. You're not nearly as quiet about your business as you think you are." She stepped back to let them in, already reaching to take the bag out of Blair's hands before Blair had thought to offer it. "Come in, come in. You look like you haven't had a real meal in days. Both of you, actually — look at him, he's gotten thin."

"I'm not thin."

"You're standing in my kitchen scowling instead of eating. That's a symptom." She was already moving toward the stove, entirely done discussing it.

Blair caught Alessandro's expression before he smoothed it back into something more composed, and it took everything she had not to laugh out loud at how thoroughly the most feared man in Trapani had just been steamrolled by his own mother in under thirty seconds.

"Don't," he said, low, not looking at her.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it very loudly."

* * *

Dinner was, against every expectation Blair had walked in with, easy.

Nicoletta talked enough for all three of them, moving between subjects the way only someone who'd earned the right to a captive audience could — the neighbor's impossible bougainvillea, a cousin's disastrous wedding, and, with visible relish, exactly how badly six-year-old Alessandro had once screamed at a golden retriever three times his size.

"It was a large dog."

"It was Signora Bellini's geriatric retriever and it could barely climb the porch steps." Nicoletta didn't even look up from her plate. "He cried for an hour. A whole hour, Blair. You should have seen him."

"I was six."

"You were terrifying at thirty and you were once afraid of an old dog. I like her knowing that." She said it warmly, but there was something underneath it too — approval, maybe, or relief, like she'd been waiting a long time for a reason to tell that story to someone who mattered.

Blair caught Alessandro watching her reaction rather than his mother, and didn't look away first, which seemed to surprise them both.

* * *

Nicoletta excused herself not long after, with a look at her son that said considerably more than her words did, and left the two of them out on the terrace with the last of the wine and the sound of water somewhere below the rocks.

"She likes you," Alessandro said, after a while.

"How can you tell?"

"She fed you." He said it like it explained everything, and from the little Blair had seen tonight, it might have. "She doesn't cook for people she's only tolerating."

"And you? Do you only cook for people you're tolerating?"

"I don't cook at all."

"That's not an answer."

Something shifted in his face — not the calm, careful register he kept for negotiations, not the flat authority he'd used on the point. Something quieter, unguarded in a way she hadn't seen from him yet.

"No," he agreed, "it isn't."

The quiet that followed wasn't the kind she'd learned to dread over the past two weeks. It sat between them easily, the kind of silence that didn't need filling, and for a long moment neither of them tried to fill it anyway.

"Thank you," Blair said finally, "for tonight. For all of it, actually. I don't think I said that properly before."

"You don't need to thank me for keeping you safe."

"I'm not thanking you for that part." She looked out at the dark water instead of at him, which made it easier to say. "I'm thanking you for tonight being easy. I didn't know I still remembered what that felt like."

When she looked back, he was watching her with an expression she didn't have a name for yet, and didn't try to guess at, because guessing felt like it would break something that was, for the first time in longer than she could remember, not currently in any danger of breaking at all.