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“It’s very dark.”
“That is intentional.”
“And loud.”
“Also intentional.”
Her gaze lowered toward Alessia’s robe and the costume beneath it.
“You made that?”
“I did.”
Teresa pinched one reinforced seam between two fingers, examining the stitches. “Your mother would have complained that the hem was too high,” she murmured.
Alessia’s expression fell slightly.
“Then she would have told every person she met that her daughter made it,” Teresa added, and Paolo placed one arm around his wife’s shoulders before she could become too emotional.
The family filled the private room. Riley had arranged enough food to supply the entire staff. Amy brought the signed production agreement for the first six-piece collection. Sloane had commissioned champagne labels reading Vesper’s Finale, though Alessia had reserved the right to perform again whenever she damn well pleased.
Maxim lifted his glass.
“To Alessia,” he said. “Who entered Nocturne as a dancer, became its most competent employee, and returns as the person trusted to run it.”
Alessia raised her own glass. “And to a family that welcomed me with open arms,” she called out.
A round of applause followed, and everyone took big swigs of their drinks.
Near the end of dinner, one of the guards brought a small brown package to the room. I knew it was from Raffaele. He’d texted the night before to ask whether he could return something of her mother’s, and she’d said yes.
She opened the package carefully. Inside lay a thin blue notebook, its cloth cover softened at the edges and marked by several old cooking stains. A faded photograph had been tucked between the first two pages.
The image showed her mother standing in a narrow New York kitchen, younger than I had ever seen her, laughing as she pointed a wooden spoon at whoever had taken the picture. Flour marked one cheek. A dark-haired Raffaele was visible in the reflection of a glass cabinet door, the camera raised in front of his face.
Teresa made a small sound. “I thought she lost that notebook.”
A handwritten card rested beneath it. Alessia read it silently, then passed it to me.
I kept this because it was the last thing in the apartment that still reminded me of your mother. It should have been yours years ago.
—Raffaele
Alessia opened the notebook. Her mother’s handwriting filled the pages—recipes, substitutions, and several complaints about Raffaele’s inability to understand seasoning.
Alessia laughed as she read it, her eyes growing glassy. After she was done, she held the notebook against her chest while Teresa told a story about her mother ruining an entire pot of sauce at seventeen because she had been too busy arguing on the phone to notice it burning. Paolo corrected the year, while Teresa corrected his memory. Riley asked for the recipe. Nikolai asked when they’d feed him.
When the celebration ended, I asked Alessia whether she wanted to stay in New York or return home.
“I want to go home,” she replied.
“Car or plane?”
“Plane. I’m too tired for the car trip.”
We reached the townhouse shortly before dawn. Alessia entered her code, dropped her overnight bag beside the stairs, and left her coat over the dining chair without even glancing toward the hook.
“There’s one more thing,” I said.
