Page 124 of Chris

“Is it weird to have two homes?”

Valeria tipped her head sideways, careful not to interrupt the kind woman who was removing the curling rollers from her hair. “You’re asking me that?”

Haven’s brow dipped. “Well, yeah. Why not?”

“You, Haven.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t Andino have two vacation homes on the west coast?”

Soft laughter floated throughout the hotel room, reminding Valeria that they weren’t alone. It was easy to get lost in the pampering she was experiencing, considering it had started the moment she opened her eyes that day.

It was, after all, her wedding day.

“I think,” Ginevra said, the roundness of her twenty-week pregnancy swell coming into view of Valeria’s gaze as she stepped between the two women’s chairs, “what Val means, is that Andino still has the brownstone, doesn’t he? Oh, and the vacation homes. The mansion in the—”

“I don’t use those,” Haven said.

Ginevra winked at Valeria, and she grinned back. This was nice. The easy banter between friends, no topic off-limits, and no worries. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she had more than one friend to count on, and now it felt like she had a small army around her at all times.

Between the people Haven brought into her life from the Marcello side of the things, and with Chris’s family … Sure, her circle was still small in a lot of ways, but it was wider than it had ever been.

That’s what counted.

“And you actually live between your two homes,” Haven continued. “Weekends in New York, and the week in Toronto. I wondered if that gets tiring.”

The travel could be annoying.

Also, very much worth it.

“You let Maria choose, didn’t you?” Ginevra asked.

Valeria nodded. “I did. I knew she missed her school in New York, but she also liked Chris’s home in Toronto, and the private school she would attend there. As long as I promised she could visit Haven every weekend, she decided Toronto was where she wanted to stay.”

Chris, bless his heart, hadn’t said a thing. Oh, Valeria knew he wanted to … more than anything, that man wanted her and Maria with him as much as possible. Yet, he kept quiet for those two weeks it took Maria to decide what she wanted to do.

Really, Valeria had always known what her daughter’s decision would be. Chris didn’t realize it, but Maria loved him inexplicably. He was the exact opposite of the men that had been forced upon her as male influences, including her—may he enjoy his place in hell—dead father.

And to give credit where it was due, Chris loved her little girl. He would spend hours with Maria doing whatever she wanted just because. Bedtimes were spent reading a dozen books because he couldn’t seem to tell her no. He learned how to manage her thick, unruly hair because Maria liked their conversations in the mornings while Valeria cooked, and Chris styled it for school.

It was painfully sweet.

Everything she thought they wouldn’t have.

Some people didn’t understand how, in just a few months, Valeria went from not knowing a man, to living with him and marrying him, but it was an easy choice for her. The right one. Because that’s what Chris was.

The right man.

The perfect one.

Hers.

And her child’s.

“I thought, after a couple of months, you might have felt differently about weekends in New York, and the rest of the time spent there,” Haven said, bringing Valeria back to the conversation. “That’s all.”

“Or are you slyly asking me to spend more time in New York with you?”