Gemma
Caravaggiowaspressedagainstmy sternum when I woke. His champagne velvet ears were flattened beneath my chin, one of them damp where I'd been breathing against it all night, and my arms were wrapped around him with the fierce, unconscious grip of a child who'd been given something precious and refused to let go even in sleep.
The dove grey nightgown had twisted around my knees sometime in the dark hours. Silk bunched and warm against my skin, carrying the faint ghost of vanilla from the shop where Dante had bought it — where he'd stood in a store full of beautiful, impossible things and told the woman behind the counter to wrap whatever I wanted.
His side of the bed was cold.
I knew before I reached for him. The particular quality of the silence — not empty but waiting, the house holding its breath around my sleeping body the way Dante held me when I cried. He'd been gone for hours. The sheets had lost his warmthentirely, cooled to the same temperature as the morning air, and his pillow held only the faint impression of his head and a folded piece of paper.
The note.
I picked it up. Unfolded it with the care of someone handling a love letter — which is what it was, even though Dante would never call it that. His handwriting was spare and angular. Each letter was deliberate. Controlled. The penmanship of a man who treated communication like architecture — every line load-bearing.
War planning with the boys. Back by six. Eat something real, not just toast. I love you. —D
I folded the note back along its creases. Reached for The Little Prince on the nightstand — the spine more creased than it had been a week ago, the pages soft with handling — and slipped the paper between the covers.
The start of a small collection.
The bedroom was warm with mid-morning light. October sun — lower now, more golden, the kind that made everything it touched look like a painting from the Dutch Golden Age. I lay still for a moment. Just breathing. Just existing in the space he'd built for us — the soft sheets, the warm floor, the particular silence of a home that was guarded. Safe.
I showered slowly, standing under the water longer than I needed to. Let the heat work its way into my shoulders, my spine, the places where I still carried tension like a second skeleton. His words lived there now — layered over the older ones, the poisonous ones, pressing them down.
You were a child. The fault is his. The shame is his.
I turned off the water.
Downstairs, the kitchen was clean and bright.
I made scrambled eggs. Soft — the way Dante made them, low heat, constant stirring, pulled off the burner before they looked done because they'd keep cooking on the plate.
I ate at the kitchen island. Both hands on the fork, feet hooked around the stool's bottom rung, a cup of tea steaming beside my plate. The eggs were almost right — slightly over, not quite as silky as his, because I didn't have his patience yet. His patience with anything. But they were good. They were real food, not toast, and I ate every bite because he'd asked me to, and because I was learning that honoring his requests wasn't the same as obeying my father's commands.
One was obedience. The other was love, answering love.
Through the kitchen window, the back garden stretched out. Two of Dante's guards stood at the perimeter fence — dark jackets, earpieces, the professional stillness of men who were very good at watching without being watched. One faced the street. The other faced the tree line at the garden's edge. They didn't look toward the house. Didn't pace or fidget or do anything that broadcast their presence to the world.
They were just there. Quiet. Constant. A wall between me and whatever waited outside it.
For the first time ever, life felt good.
Ilovedthelibrary.
Daddy was away, so that meant I could read all day long!
This place felt like home.
My Caravaggio book, splayed open to theJudith Beheading Holofernesbecause I'd been thinking about women and violence and the quiet ferocity of surviving. The cashmere blanket from Little Wonders, draped over the seat's cushion in dusty rose, softening the angles.
I didn't reach for art history.
The Caravaggio book stayed open on its page. Instead, my hands found the leather pencil case — forty-eight colors in their neat row, each barrel engraved with its name in that whimsical-elegant typeface. I unzipped it slowly. Ran my fingertip along the points the way I'd done in the shop, feeling the waxy resistance of pigment against skin. Crimson. Cerulean. Burnt sienna. Umber. The names themselves were beautiful — a vocabulary of color that felt like a language I'd once been fluent in and forgotten.
The constellation picture book had blank pages at the back. Heavy cream stock, meant for notes or observations. I turned to the first blank page. Smoothed my palm across it. The paper was cool and slightly textured beneath my hand.
I picked up the pencil markedraw umberand started to draw.
Not constellations. Dante.
