“Pietro.”
“And he,” he said, “is not the man who walked to the guest room. He is the man who walked into a cellar in Malta and put two rounds in the man who had laid hands on her, and walked her out, and brought her home, and has slept seven hours every night since.”
“Six,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“Six,” he agreed. “Sometimes.”
He turned the original contract over. He laid it face down on the table between us. He set his palm flat on top of it.
“I want to write a new one,” he said. “Here. Tonight. In ink. By the people we are now. I want to do it with you across the table, not me dictating and you nodding. I want you to write your terms first, this time. I want to see your hand on the page before mine. And I want this—this contract, here, tonight, the two of us—to be the vow.”
I looked at the new paper.
I looked at the pen.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s write.”
I wrote the first line.
Honesty. At all times. No games. No exceptions.
The nib made a small whispering noise on the paper. Pietro watched me write.
“That one stays,” I said.
“That one stays.”
I drew a small underline beneath it. Two lines. The same two lines I had drawn under it eight months ago, in pencil, on the page now face down between us.
Then I lifted the pen and I thought, for a moment, about the thing I wanted to write next. I had been thinking about it since the vineyard. I had been thinking about it, really, since Malta—since I had walked out of a powder room in socks and gone south on a sidewalk and not told anyone. And before that, I had been thinking about it since the night Pietro had told me a lie in a glass house and watched me cry. The shape had been there for months. The words had not arrived until tonight.
I wrote them now.
Nothing carried alone. Not a lie. Not a fear. Not a danger. Not a grief. Not anything. We carry it together or we do not carry it at all.
The pen stopped at the period.
I set it down.
I did not look up.
Pietro turned the page a quarter inch toward himself. He read it. I knew he read it because his breathing changed—the small audible draw of a man taking in something serious.
“Baby.”
“Mm.”
“Look at me.”
I looked up.
His eyes were wet.
“I lied to you.”
“I went alone.”
“Yes.”
