Semua Bab THE DON WHO COULDN'T LOVE : Bab 11 - Bab 20

Three days passed after the dinner, and Dante spoke to me only in the clipped, functional sentences of a man managing a crisis rather than a marriage.*Pass the salt. We're expected at the Barone function Thursday. Wear the blue.*I told myself it was the aftermath of Luciano — the retaliation everyone expected but couldn't predict, the sleepless nights I heard pacing the hallway outside my door long after midnight. I told myself the walls he'd raised in that hallway after the dinner were temporary, a man protecting a family under threat rather than a man protecting himself from me specifically.By the fourth day, I was no longer certain that distinction mattered.***The Barone function turned out to be a business dinner disguised as a social one — a dozen men in dark suits, their wives arranged around them like decorative proof of respectability, all of them gathered in a private room at a restaurant so exclusive it didn't bother with a sign out front.Dante's hand found the small o

I found Nonna Rosa in the small greenhouse at the edge of the estate the following morning, exactly where Marta had told me she could usually be found before the household fully woke — kneeling among rows of herbs and roses, her sleeves pushed up, dirt beneath her fingernails despite the fine rings she wore even here."Cara." She didn't look up from the plant she was tending. "I wondered how long it would take you to come find me.""You knew I'd come?""I knew Dante would send you, or you'd come on your own, whichever happened first." She sat back on her heels, studying me with the same sharp, patient attention I remembered from the dinner three nights ago. "After everything that's surfaced this past week, I imagine you have questions only an old woman who's buried three generations of this family's secrets can answer."***I knelt beside her among the roses, the morning air still cool, the greenhouse glass fogged faintly at the edges. "My father told me something yesterday. About my

Two weeks after the dinner, I received a note delivered by a courier I didn't recognize — plain envelope, no return address, my name written in a careful, elegant hand I'd seen once before, on a place card at a wedding reception that felt, now, like it belonged to a different lifetime. Marta brought it up with the afternoon post, her expression carefully neutral in the way I'd learned meant she suspected something but wasn't going to be the one to name it.*Isabella — I owe you an apology, and a conversation neither of us has been permitted to have honestly. Meet me at the café on Via Fiori, Thursday, eleven o'clock. Come alone, or don't come at all. Whatever you decide, know that I mean you no harm. Only the truth, which seems to be in short supply in this family lately. — L.*I read it three times before I understood my hands were shaking. I sat with it for a long while afterward, turning it over, studying the careful, deliberate handwriting for any hint of the man beneath it — the

The storm rolled in without warning, the way summer storms along this coast always seemed to, turning a clear afternoon sky the color of old bruises within the space of an hour.I'd gone out to the greenhouse to find Nonna Rosa, hoping for another quiet morning among her roses, only to discover she'd already retreated inside at the first distant rumble of thunder, leaving me alone in the garden as the first fat drops of rain began to fall.I was halfway back to the house, soaked through despite my best efforts, when Dante found me.***"You look like you lost an argument with the sky," he said, jogging the last few steps to reach me, an umbrella he'd clearly grabbed too late held uselessly over both our heads."I lost an argument with poor planning," I said, laughing despite myself, despite the rain plastering my hair to my face and my dress clinging uncomfortably to my skin. "I thought I had more time before it broke.""No one ever has more time than they think, with these storms." H

I found Dante on the estate's east terrace late one evening, a glass of wine untouched beside him, staring out at the darkened garden with an expression I hadn't seen from him before — not guarded, exactly, but distant, as though some part of him had wandered somewhere I couldn't follow."You're missing dinner," I said, settling into the chair beside his."I lost track of time." He didn't look at me, his eyes still fixed on the garden, though I doubted he was actually seeing it. "Today would have been my father's sixty-third birthday."***Something in the quiet weight of that admission made me stay silent, waiting, sensing that whatever came next needed space rather than questions."I don't usually notice the date," he continued, after a moment. "I've trained myself not to. But Nonna Rosa mentioned it this morning, almost in passing, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.""Tell me about him," I said quietly. "If you want to. Not the version everyone else knew. The