Page 147 of The Art of Ruin

The softness in her voice makes me look at her properly this time.

She’s smiling now, but gentler than before.

Less teasing.

More relieved.

“He makes you happy.”

The simple honesty of it catches me off guard enough that I go quiet for a second. He does make me happy. In ways I wasn’t expecting. In ways I don’t entirely know what to do with yet. He isn’t showy or extravagant; he’s quiet and thoughtful. His care is in his every action, rather than performed as a loud spectacle.

“He’s…” I exhale slowly, tracing absent circles against the edge of the yoga mat beneath my fingertips, “different with me than I thought he’d be.”

Isabella snorts softly. “That man has been gone over you for months.”

“That’s absolutely not true.”

“Casey.” She gives me a look. “He nearly murdered Matteo for joking about you wearing another man’s coat at Christmas.”

I blink. “What? The coat was Rossi’s.”

“Hmm. I know.”

“That seems a little excessive.”

“He’s Italian. And his father was the head of the Mafia. It’s in his blood.”

“That cannot be the excuse for everything.”

“It’s the excuse for most things.”

Despite myself, I laugh. Then my smile softens slightly as I stare toward the ceiling. “My mom used to make me do yoga with her,” I say absentmindedly. “Well. Mostly she used to fall over in the middle of the living room while we laughed at those terrible DVDs from the nineties.”

The memory is warm and bittersweet all at once.

“She sounds fun.”

“She was.” I smile faintly. “She loved anything artsy. Old bookstores, galleries, making jewelry at the kitchen table. Most of my childhood memories involve glitter glue and her pretending we were creating masterpieces.”

Isabella smiles softly. “I wish I’d got to meet her.”

“Me too. She would have loved you. She had this favorite book she was obsessed with about a female detective from the fifties who solved crimes in a sleepy little town in England.” I laugh quietly at the memory. “She used to read it to me when I was little, and then later, when she got sick, I used to read it back to her in the hospital because she kept falling asleep halfway through.”

Emotion tightens unexpectedly in my throat.

God.I haven’t talked about my mother this much in years.

“You miss her,” Isabella says gently.

“All the time.”

And suddenly I’m hit with this strange awareness that lately, for the first time in forever, grief hasn’t felt quite so heavy all the time. Even though in some ways my life is more uncertain than ever, I feel more grounded and less untethered.

My grief is softer, not gone. It will never be gone; it’s just… easier to carry somehow.

Maybe because lately I’m not carrying everything alone anymore.

“He takes care of me,” I admit quietly before I can stop myself. “Like really takes care of me. Jasper used to disappear whenever things became difficult. He’d pull away emotionally first, then physically. Eventually, I stopped asking for comfort because it always felt vaguely humiliating to need more than someone wanted to give.”