Page 66 of Shades of Grey & Gold

She’s at the sink, back to me, and her shoulders are held very still.

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, feeling like I’m intruding. “I can go—”

“No.” She shakes her head and turns, and she has a dish towel pressed against her face and when she brings it down her eyes are bright and brimmed with tears. “No, please—don’t.”

She looks at me for a moment and then she laughs softly, a little embarrassed.

“Happy tears,” she says. “Don’t mind me, I’m a foolish old lady.”

“You’re not,” I offer a small smile.

She takes a breath and looks toward the doorway, toward the noise of her children still arguing at the table.

“Do you know how long it has been since they were all in the same room?” She shakes her head. “Nico is here more, the girls I see every day, but Cal—” She stops. “He is in and out… if I’m lucky every few months. But this time, it feels like he came home, not just for work but home. And he brought you. And they’re all in there at the same time, at our table.”

I don’t say anything.

She reaches out and takes my hands between both of hers, the way she did the first time I came through her door. Her hands are warm and certain, just like her voice.

“I don’t know how much he’s told you,” she says it slowly, but definitively. “About his father. About how things go around here.” She pauses. “His father, toward the end, had lost something. In his eyes. A light.” She looks at me steadily. “And I have been watchingCal very carefully for the past few years as he has taken more and more on because I know what that looks like and I was afraid—” She squeezes my hands. “I was afraid he was going down the same road.”

I think about the penthouse; how it looks like he just comes and goes but nothing looks like it’s actually lived in. How he said he went to Ellison to get away from everything here, even though it all continues to try and pull him back in.

“But he came home,” she says, “and you are with him, and I look at my Cal, and I see my son again. The one I’ve loved for thirty-one years.” She smiles and it’s a full one. “So, forgive a silly old woman for her happy tears. I don’t know if it’s you or—but he hasn’t seemed this—this right in a long time.”

I squeeze her hands back. I don’t have words for this moment that are adequate, so I don’t try to find them.

She pats my hands once and releases them, turning back to the counter with a sniff.

“Am I interrupting?”

Cal. His voice has a careful quality.

Carmela spins around and points the dish towel at him. She says something in Italian—fast, emphatic, it sounds like both curt instruction and affection simultaneously.

He ducks his head slightly, chin down, the way he does when he’s absorbing something, and she crosses the kitchen to him. Tossing the dish towel into his hands and cupping his face in both her hands, she kisses him once on each cheek. She walks back out to the dining room leaving Cal and me in the kitchen.

Cal eyes me from across the kitchen.

“What did she say?” I ask.

He tilts his head. Rubs his eye with one hand. “You sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

A small exhale, and then he makes good on the promise to always answer my questions with the truth: “She said, ‘Don’t fuck this up, she’s perfect.’”

I feel the smile work its way across my face against my best efforts. I look at the counter then back at him.

“So,” I raise my eyebrows. “Don’t fuck this up, Renzetti.”

He shakes his head, slowly making his way around the island to where I’m leaning against the counter. He cups my face in his hands and his smile is wide. He kisses me once on the forehead and it warms me from the inside out.

1.braciole —a classic Italian dish made with thin slices of meat, filled with breadcrumbs, cheese, garlic, and herbs, then rolled up, tied or pinned closed, and cooked slowly in tomato sauce until tender

Chapter Twenty-One

Max