“I pushed you into a corner the night of that dinner. I wanted to see if you’d run.”
“I didn’t.”
“No. You didn’t.” Teresa sat down across from her. “Do you know why I kept setting Luca up with women I knew he’d hate?”
Emma shook her head.
“Because I was waiting for him to choose someone himself. To fight for someone. To look at a woman the way his grandfather looked at me.”
Emma’s throat tightened.
“I knew the moment you called him darling,” Teresa continued. “Not because it was convincing. Because it wasn’t. You were terrified and improvising and so obviously in love with him that I wanted to laugh.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were. You just didn’t know it yet.”
Teresa stood. Paused at the door.
“My husband used to say that the Morettis don’t fall in love easily. But when we do, it’s the kind of love that rewrites everything.”
She left Emma sitting there, heart racing, book forgotten.
That night, Emma told Luca what Teresa had said.
They were in bed, tangled together in the dark, her head on his chest, his hand tracing absent patterns on her shoulder.
“She’s right,” Luca said quietly.
“About what?”
“The rewriting part.”
Emma tilted her head to look at him. “What did I rewrite?”
Luca’s hand stilled. “Everything. The way I think about this house. The way I move through the world. The way I breathe.”
Emma’s eyes burned.
“I used to think love was a liability,” Luca continued. “Something that made you weak. Gave people leverage. Made you vulnerable.”
“And now?”
“Now I think it’s the only thing that makes any of this worth surviving.”
Emma kissed him.
They made love slowly, carefully, like they were learning a language only they spoke.
Afterward, Emma lay awake, listening to Luca’s breathing even out beside her.
She thought about Sophie, safe in Chicago. About Teresa, who had engineered this entire thing without either of them realizing. About Camille, who had disappeared after that dinner and hadn’t been seen since.
She thought about the maid she’d been six months ago. Invisible. Exhausted. Desperate enough to lie to one of the most powerful families in the city.
That version of herself felt impossibly distant now.
Emma turned to look at Luca.
