Page 39 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

Epilogue

“MAMA. IS IT A BOY OR a girl?”

“We don’t know yet, baby.”

“Well, can you ask?”

It’s a Sunday in June, I’m four months along, and I’m sitting in a rocking chair in the yellow room while my daughter interrogates my stomach like a small tax inspector.

All four walls are yellow now. Marcello had them done in the same shade I picked out nine years ago, Dandelion—he took the old tin to the shop himself and stood at the counter until a man matched it.

The crib’s out of its box, too. It took him three hours and a great deal of Italian, while Daniele sat on the floor handing him the wrong screws on purpose.

The rabbit is on the windowsill. Rica took the price tag off it in March, on the grounds that it was “embarrassing for him.”

“If it’s a boy,” my daughter announces, “I’m teaching him poker.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Uncle Vico taught me—”

She stops. So do I.

That still happens. It happened at Easter. It happened at her school concert. Every time, one of us says something out loud instead of letting it sit.

“He did,” I agree. “You were very good at it, too.”

“I am very good at it.”

It’s always a struggle not to cry over moments like this. I just can’t thank God enough that He’s helping my daughter process how the people we love...can make mistakes. Bad, evil mistakes. Rica doesn’t yet know that Vico was also the mastermind behind the abduction. Maybe one day, when she’s old enough I’ll tell her. But for now...

“Hello. I’m your sister. I’m eight.”

I just want to enjoy seeing Rica talking to her unborn sibling.

“When you come out, don’t cry at night, because Mama’s tired.”

Somewhere below us a door goes, and my whole body sits up before my brain does.

Eleven years, but it still does that.

“That’s Papa,” Rica says with enormous scorn. “You’ve gone pink.”

“I have not gone pink.”

“You’ve gone so pink. You always go pink.” She slides off the arm of the chair and makes for the door, because there’s nothing in this world she loves more than being the one to open it. “PAPA! Mama’s gone pink again!”

“Rica Bastianelli—”

“It’s not a secret, Mama. Everyone in this house knows.”

She’s gone before I can get out of the chair, which at four months I now do at roughly the speed of continental drift.

Then my husband is in the doorway with his jacket over one shoulder, his tie already off.

Eleven years. A wedding, an exile, a guesthouse kitchen, two hundred and something Saturdays in a car park.

The man leans on the doorframe of our daughter’s old nursery, rumpled and enormous and faintly amused, and my heart does exactly what it did the first time he walked into a jewellery shop and made me want to cry less than five minutes later because he’s so gorgeous, and I thought he belonged to someone else.