“I used to wait for her by the window,” he continues. “Every night. I’d press my forehead to the cold glass and count the headlights. There were days she came home smiling, humming old Italian lullabies while she cooked. Days when she would dance barefoot in our tiny kitchen and tell me I was her ‘little prince.’” His lips lift in a smile so faint it looks painful to wear. “Those were the good days.”
He swallows hard, and I see his jaw clench, the memory forcing its way through the cracks in his composure.
“But the bad days…” His voice trails off, darker now. “The bad days were when she didn’t come home at all. When the house smelled like my father’s anger and I learned—far too young—that silence can be a kind of violence.”
A chill crawls through me.
“She tried to leave him once,” he says. “Tried to take me with her. I remember her shaking so badly she couldn’t hold the keys. I remember her whispering in my ear that we were going somewhere safe. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere he couldn’t hurt us.”
His fingers rub together unconsciously, like he can still feel the texture of that moment.
“But no one escapes a man like my father,” he murmurs. “He dragged her back inside by her hair while I watched from the doorway. I couldn’t have been more than seven.”
My breath catches.
“She stopped singing after that,” he says nearly in a whisper. “Stopped dancing. Stopped looking me in the eye. It was like someone blew out all the candles inside her, one by one, until she was just… smoke.”
Giacomo’s voice breaks, just slightly, but enough to unravel something inside me.
“The night before she died,” he continues, eyes fixed on some point far beyond the room, “she sat on the edge of my bed, and for the first time in months, she touched my face. Her hands were cold. She smelled like rain and something metallic. She told me she loved me. Just once. Just those words. And I—” His breath hitches. “I didn’t say it back. I was too angry she’d stopped trying to run.”
There’s a long, aching pause.
“I found her the next morning,” he says, each word a hollowed-out wound. “She didn’t overdose by accident. She chose to go somewhere my father could never follow.”
My heart splinters.
“People like to say I’m cold,” he whispers, staring at his hands like they belong to someone else. “But the truth is, I have spent my entire life trying to build a home where no one has to press their forehead to a window and wonder if love is coming back. I want a wife I can protect. A wife I can give what she never had. Respect. Devotion. The right to be safe in her own skin.”
When he finally lifts his gaze to mine, I see it.
A single tear. Silent. Unapologetic. Cutting down his cheek like a confession he never intended to share.
Before I know what I’m doing, my fingers reach forward—drawn to him, to the broken boy beneath the man—and restlightly on his hand. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t hide. He simply lets me touch him, and it feels like I’ve been granted access to the most forbidden part of him.
“She was the only person who ever loved me without wanting something in return,” he says, voice barely audible. “And I couldn’t save her. So now… I save what I can.”
The room feels unbearably small, filled with the ghost of a woman I never knew and the weight of a grief he has carried alone for decades.
“I choose you, Beatrice,” he murmurs, thumb brushing the back of my hand in a reverent stroke. “Not because you are perfect, or obedient, or beautiful. But because I see the softness in you. The same softness my mother had. And I will not fail you the way she was failed.”
My pulse stutters. My lungs tighten.
And something inside me—somethingfragile and trembling—shifts toward him in a way that terrifies me.
He leans in, his breath warm against my cheek, his grief still shimmering in his eyes.
His breath warms the hollow of my cheek, the grief in his eyes softening into something almost unrecognizable—a gentleness so at odds with the man I thought I knew that it roots me to the spot.
For a moment, neither of us speaks. The room is hushed, suspended, holding its breath around us.
Then Giacomo lifts a hand—slowly, carefully, as though he’s afraid I might flinch—and brushes his fingers through a strand of my hair.
It’s the lightest touch.
And to my own surprise…I lean into it.
Not because I’m coerced or cornered. Not because he’s the man I’m expected to marry.
