The light completes another turn. It feels like a benediction I don’t deserve and plan to earn anyway.
“Say it,” she whispers, eyes on my mouth now, because we’re us and words and heat live in the same skin. “What you want.”
“I want you,” I say. “I want this island to carry our fingerprints. I want every room I own to remember your laugh before my temper. I want your name carved into the contracts because you build things no one else can see until they’re standing inside them.” I pull the folded letter from my pocket—Mara’s formal offer refit in my words—and hand it to her. “Chief Experience Architect. Skunkworks here on the island first, then wider. Budget carved clean. Rope and roses, your way.”
Her hand shakes once. She reads. The beam sweeps across her face, and I watch the exact second the job stops being a courtesy and becomes a place to stand.
“Your light doesn’t dim mine,” I repeat, needing her to feel it all the way through. “It makes the edges make sense.”
The note lowers. Her eyes lift. The world does that thing where it narrows to the square foot we share and widens to include every year that delivered us to it.
“Yes,” she says, first on a breath, then again, stronger, because she’s Naomi and she knows how to sign a thing twice when it matters. “Yes to the role.”
Air. Salt. The smallest, wildest relief. I open my mouth to say something charming and fail because the oldest sentence is kicking to be born.
She saves me.
“And,” she breathes, stepping into me so the words land where they were always meant to, “yes to us. For real. And forever. I love you, Vasso.”
The sea goes loud and the glass holds, but my knees might not.
I take her face in my hands like it’s holy because it is, and press my mouth to hers with no performance in it at all. It tastes like fruit and dawn and ten years of wrong turns finally spitting us out in front of the right door.
When I lift my head, I rest my forehead on hers. “Marry me again,” I say. “Not for cameras. For life.”
She laughs, tears bright, mouth reckless. “Bossy.”
“Practice,” I murmur. “I love you, Naomi Dillinger. So fucking much. Say yes a third time. Make it binding.”
She kisses me once. Quick, sure. And then slow, deep, and sure.
When she lifts her head, her eyes are shining. “Yes.”
###
The beam finds us and moves on, but we are different than we were when it left.
He’s still Vasso—unapologetic, impossible, the man who learned how to make a world from splinters—but something in him is softened in the way steel is soft when it’s just come out of the forge: malleable, dangerous, wanting a shape.
We lean our backs to the glass and watch our island wake.
Gulls swoop and spin, gullible and greedy, as the staff road lights up one by one, the line of the path I pitched to investors already staked by someone who took my email as a command.
Vasso looks out at the water, then down at me with that shook expression I’ve only ever seen in private moments—greenhouse summer; red silk in Milan. “We’ll still fight,” he warns, dry and honest. “Every now and then.”
“Of course,” I say, and the smile this time is real. “But we’ll learn to make up faster.”
The light turns, carrying our faces to sea and back. My grandfather’s words fold around my ribs—less secrets, more confession—and settle there like good bones. I take Vasso’s hand and press it flat over my heart.
“Feel that?” I whisper.
He closes his eyes. “Yes.”
“That’s yours. It’s been yours since apricots and terrible still lifes.”
“Your still lifes were criminal,” he says gravely.
“I was seducing you with fruit.”
