"He's been saying it since I was a boy." I looked out the window at the grounds, gray and still in the late afternoon. "Usually about this house. He said it remembered things we'd forgotten, which drove my mother insane because she wanted to redecorate the east sitting room and he kept saying the house wouldn't allow it."
A smile broke across her face, quick and unguarded, and she laughed before she could decide not to. "Did she redecorate it?"
"Three times. He pretended not to notice each time, which was its own kind of victory for both of them." I watched her laugh settle into something quieter and warmer and thought that she had a very good laugh, the kind that came from somewhere genuine rather than from politeness. "He likes you," I said.
"I like him." She said it simply and meant it. "He argued with me about Sicilian wine for forty minutes yesterday and was completely wrong the entire time and absolutely refused to concede a single point."
"That's how you know he likes you. He only bothers arguing with people he respects." I leaned back in the chair. "With everyone else he just agrees and then does whatever he was going to do anyway."
She smiled again, and then it faded into something more thoughtful and she looked at the book in her lap. "He's not what I expected," she said. "None of this is what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
She was quiet for a moment, turning the book over in her hands. "I expected to be managed," she said. "Handled. Kept somewhere safe and convenient and told what was going to happen to me." She looked up. "I didn't expect to be given a kitchen and a library and introduced to your father like I was a person who mattered."
The honesty of it landed somewhere specific. "You do matter," I said.
"I know that." She held my gaze steadily. "I mean I didn't expect you to act like I did."
We looked at each other across the library in the fading afternoon light and I thought about Emilio's report that morning, about the narrowing window, about the call that was coming from Italy and what needed to be in place before it arrived. I had been planning to have this conversation tomorrow. I had been telling myself I needed one more day to be certain I wasn't acting on convenience dressed up as something else.
Sitting across from her in the library with the last of the afternoon light in her hair I understood that I had been certain for two days and had been giving myself permission to wait because certainty felt too fast and I didn't trust things that came quickly.
"There's something I need to talk to you about," I said.
"I know." She set the book aside. "Your man Emilio has been walking around with that folder for two days and every time he sees me in the hallway he looks at me like he's calculating something." She raised an eyebrow. "I'm not oblivious, Constantine."
"I didn't think you were."
"Then talk to me." She shifted in the chair, turning to face me properly. "Whatever it is, I'd rather hear it plainly than have it managed."
So I told her plainly. The intelligence from Italy, her father working through the Chicago families methodically, the contact with Lombardi, the window that was narrowing faster than any of us had anticipated. I laid out the operational reality of it without softening the edges, because she'd told me in the car that she wanted the truth and I believed her.
She listened without interrupting, her expression attentive and still, and when I finished she was quiet for a moment. "You're going to propose marriage," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Because it's the most effective way to make me untouchable before my father makes contact with you directly."
"That's part of it," I said.
She caught the distinction immediately, her eyes sharpening slightly. "What's the other part?"
This was the part I had been circling for two days, the part that sat underneath the operational logic like a foundation under a building, something you didn't see but that was holding everything else up. I had told myself I would be careful about this, that I would present the practical case and leave the rest alone, that there was a conversation to have first and feelings to examine after.
Looking at her across the library I decided that was a form of dishonesty I wasn't willing to engage in with this particular woman.
"I've watched you for three days," I said. "I've watched you sit with my father and make him laugh and argue with him about the color of the sky. I've watched you take over my mother's kitchen and make my mother feel like the intrusion was agift rather than an imposition. I've watched you navigate an impossible situation with more grace and more nerve than most men I know would manage." I held her gaze. "The other part is that I don't want you to leave. And that's true independent of everything else."
The room was very quiet. Outside the last of the afternoon light was going flat and pewter-colored, the particular quality of Chicago winter light in the hour before dark. She looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn't fully read, and then she looked down at her hands in her lap.
"That's a considerable thing to say to someone you've known for three days," she said.
"I know."
"I said something like that to your father yesterday." She looked back up, and there was something in her expression now that was more open than her usual careful composure, something that had decided to be honest. "I told him I didn't expect to feel at home here. He told me that home wasn't always the place you came from. Sometimes it was the place that had room for you."
"He's right," I said.
