Page 146 of Promised to the Don of Naples
I felt my eyes well up.
Matteo appeared on the path through the vineyard and came over to us. He sat on the ground, in front of the bench, the way he used to sit as a child.
"Sorella. Luca told me."
I smiled and put my hand on my belly.
"You're going to be an uncle, Matteo."
He laughed with those slightly gapped front teeth, the smile I'd recognized in that photo on the wall of his mother's room.
The same smile from when we were children.
"Uncle," he repeated, the way you try out a new word. "Madonna. Uncle."
Donna Beatrice crossed the garden with a tray. Coffee for the nonna, tea for me—she'd already swapped my coffee for tea without my asking, because she knew, everyone in this house knew now.
She set the tray on the bench, but before she left, she stopped and looked at me.
"It'll be good to have a child in this house again, signora," she said, low. "It's been thirty-four years."
And she left, in her way, without waiting for an answer.
The sun began to drop over the bay.
I looked at the house—Villa Moretti, white, enormous. For months it had been a fortress: windows shut, soldiers doubled, heavy curtains. Now, at the end of that afternoon, with the nonna beside me and Matteo on the ground and a child inside me, it was beginning to look like something else.
It was beginning to look like home.
I looked at Vesuvius, on the other side of the bay. Dark, enormous, sleeping in the blue water, as always. But that afternoon, with the sun going down behind it and the sky turning the color of fire, it looked, for the first time, at peace.
Thank you, I thought—I don't know to whom.
To Mamma. To Marta. To the two mothers who sat on this bench before me.
I came out whole, and I didn't come alone.
CHAPTER 46
"I'd never laughed in a man's bed. I thought sex was something serious, or dangerous, or both. No one had told me that with the right person it's also funny."
VALENTINAMORETTI
Breakfast on the terrace turned into tea.
Donna Beatrice had decided that on her own—she showed up with the pot of chamomile and took the espresso away from in front of me without asking, in her way.
I'd already given up arguing. The whole house now looked after my belly as if it were collective property.
Luca was beside me, an unlit cigar in his hand—he'd stopped lighting them near me since Capri, without my asking.
"I want out," he said.
"Out of where?"
"Out of the dark." He set the cigar down on the table. "Slowly. The legal businesses stay—the hotels, the shipping, the import. That's clean, that's ours, that's what I pass to our child without shame." He looked at me. "The rest, I'm getting out of. In ten years Raffaele takes over the part you can't drop all at once."
I looked at him for a while.
