Katie turns to me, and for a moment I think she’s going to punch me. Instead, she extends her hand. I take it, and her grip is firm and steady.
“Take care of her,” Katie says quietly. “She’s the best person I know, and she deserves the world.”
“I know,” I say. “And I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to give it to her.”
Katie nods once. It’s not forgiveness, exactly, but acknowledgment. Recognition that Gigi has made her choice and Katie is going to respect it, even if she doesn’t fully understand or agree with it.
After she leaves, Gigi comes to stand beside me, slipping her hand into mine. We watch through the window as Katie’s car disappears down the drive.
“Thank you,” Gigi says softly. “For that. For her.”
“You don’t need to thank me for giving you what should have always been yours.” I pull her close, my hand finding its now-familiar place on her stomach. “You and our baby and Katie and anyone else who matters to you—you get to keep all of it. I’m not taking anything else away from you. Not ever again.”
She looks up at me, and the love in her eyes is almost too much to bear. “I know. I believe you.”
Standing there in our home, with our baby growing between us and the promise of a real future finally within reach, I realize something profound.
Marco was right all along.
Real strength doesn’t come from destroying what you hate. It comes from protecting what you love.
And I’m going to spend the rest of my life protecting this—Gigi, our baby, our family.
Not because I have to.
Because I want to.
Because this is what being alive really means.
31
GIULIANA
Six Months Later
This time, the dress is exactly what I wanted.
No cathedral train, no hand-sewn crystals, and no designer label. Just ivory silk that skims over my rounded belly, sleeveless with a sweetheart neckline, and falling to just above my ankles. Katie helped me find it at a small boutique, and the moment I put it on I knew it was perfect.
This is what I should have worn the first time. This is the dress of a woman choosing love, not accepting captivity.
“You look beautiful,” Katie says from behind me, her voice thick with emotion. She’s been crying on and off all morning, happy tears that she blames on being “emotionally compromised by the whole situation.”
I meet her eyes in the mirror. “Thank you,” I tell her sincerely. “For everything. For being here, for?—”
“Stop.” She comes to stand beside me, adjusting the small crown of wildflowers in my hair. “You’re going to make me cry again, and I just fixed my makeup.”
The wildflowers were Luca’s idea. He remembered me mentioning once that I loved the wildflower meadow behind my childhood home, how my mother would take me there and we’d make flower crowns together. So this morning, I woke to find fresh wildflowers—daisies and black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace—waiting in the bedroom with a note in Luca’s slanted handwriting:for a queen who deserves flowers that grow free.
I’mdefinitelygoing to cry before I even make it down the aisle.
The chapel is small, tucked away in a quiet corner of the estate grounds. Luca said it hadn’t been used in years but I had fallen in love with the quaint building. It was easy to decide that we needed to use it. It’s a place that would be ours, where we could start this chapter of our lives without the weight of our first wedding hanging over us.
“Are you ready?” Katie asks, and I can see the concern beneath her smile. Even after six months, she sometimes looks at me like she’s for signs that I’m not really as happy as I seem.
But I am happy. Deliriously, impossibly,completelyhappy.
“I’m ready,” I tell her, and I mean it with every fiber of my being.
