جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 50

Every August, the extended Marchetti-Reyes clan gathered at Elena and Daniel's beach house for what the family called, with total sincerity and zero irony, "Chaos Weekend" — three days of cousins, in-laws, half the neighborhood wandering in and out, and a photographer Elena's old publicist insisted on hiring even though nobody had asked for professional photos of a backyard barbecue in fifteen years, a tradition that had simply calcified into permanence the way family traditions tend to.This year, for reasons Ava refused to examine too closely, Costanza Castellano and her grandson had been invited, an invitation that had apparently been extended weeks ago without anyone informing Ava directly."Why is he here," Ava hissed at her mother, watching Enzo across the yard, hopelessly out of place in a crisp button-down among a sea of cousins in swimsuits and flip-flops, looking like he'd wandered onto the wrong movie set entirely."Costanza's been my friend for twenty-six years, Ava. She c

"You're dating," Leo said, the word landing in the middle of Sunday dinner like a dropped plate, his fork frozen halfway to his mouth. "You're dating Enzo Castellano. The cannoli-in-the-backpack guy. The guy you once told me you'd rather marry a cactus than be in a room with.""That was one incident, twenty years ago, and he's grown considerably since then, in every possible way," Ava said, stealing bread off her father's plate again, though this time her ears had gone visibly pink, a tell Leo had learned to recognize since childhood and clearly filed away for future teasing purposes.Daniel Reyes looked between his daughter and the boy — man, now, though it was hard for Daniel to think of him as anything but the serious little kid who used to trail behind his grandmother at the farmer's market, cataloguing every purchase with an intensity most children reserved for cartoons — sitting stiffly beside her, clearly braced for interrogation, spine straight, hands folded on the table like

Costanza Castellano did not believe in letting two young idiots ruin something good over what she privately termed, to anyone who'd listen, "a man's inability to say sorry properly," a category of failure she'd witnessed in three generations of Castellano men and had grown increasingly impatient with over the decades.She found Enzo in his restaurant office at eleven p.m., three days after the fight, staring at spreadsheets he clearly wasn't reading, the numbers blurring together in front of eyes that hadn't slept properly since Tuesday."Your grandfather did the same thing," she said, settling into the chair across from him without invitation, the way she'd settled into that same chair a thousand times over the years, first to check on her husband, now to check on her grandson. "When we were young, younger than you are now. Tried to buy out a rival bakery without asking me, because he thought protecting me meant deciding things for me instead of beside me.""What did you do?""I let

They found each other in the alley between their buildings at midnight, both having chosen the same hour without discussing it, which felt, to both of them, entirely too much like the last twenty years to be a coincidence."I was scared," Enzo said, before she could say anything, before his own nerve could talk him out of it a second time. "Not about Marco. About you. About how much I wanted to protect this — us — and how I don't have any practice doing that without also trying to own every piece of it. I've spent two years keeping my restaurant standing by controlling everything I could reach because everything I couldn't reach, I lost. My father. My mother, before that, when she left and never really explained why. I didn't know how to want you without gripping too hard, without treating you like something that might disappear if I looked away.""I know," Ava said softly, closing some of the distance between them, though not all of it, not yet. "I get it. I really do. But Enzo, I've

Enzo had the ring for three weeks before he found the nerve, and even then, the universe — or, more accurately, Ava's extended family — had other plans entirely.He'd chosen the pier at sunset, the same pier where she'd once texted him a photo of an offended raccoon and started something neither of them had been brave enough to name at the time. He'd rehearsed a whole speech, had practiced it in his empty restaurant kitchen at midnight for a week straight, had even run it past Costanza twice for her approval. He had not rehearsed for Uncle Marco appearing out of nowhere mid-speech, beer in hand, to ask if anyone had seen the good tongs, the ones with the rubber grip, because his brother had borrowed them for a barbecue and never returned them and it was becoming a whole thing."Uncle Marco, I am currently proposing," Enzo said, with the flat, deadly patience of a man who'd learned to survive Chaos Weekend and several other family gatherings without losing his composure entirely."Oh!