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I shake my head. "Just share with me. It’s pistachio."

"A nut is not an ice cream… it’s a trail mix," he says as I had it over to him.

He takes the cone from my hand, like I knew he would, because under all that hard shell of control, Everett is curious about things. Like he wants to understand the world, just under his own scope.

He takes a lick of the ice cream as we start walking again. I brace for his judgement on my flavor decision because I know it’s coming.

"It’s not bad," he says, and then hands it back.

We keep walking.

I want to remember this day forever. The image of Everett Kauffman, the Tin Man, the CEO, the man behind the glass, standing on a cobblestone street in the French Riviera with a dusting of powdered sugar, robbed of gelato by a seagull, and sharing my ice cream cone like a normal person on a normal day.

If only Everly and his brothers could see this. They wouldn’t believe me. Or… maybe they would. Maybe this is the part of him that they all know he has deep down. The reason they push and prod him.

By late afternoon, we've walked nearly every street in the village.

And I've been looking.

At every balcony with blue shutters and climbing roses. At every apartment that might have been hers. Then Everett stops dead in his tracks and looks up.

"Up here," he says at one point, touching my elbow and steering me up a side street I would have walked past.

We climb. The road narrows into a path, then a staircase, then a landing that opens onto a small terrace between two buildings.

And there it is.

A balcony apartment. With blue shutters, faded by decades of sun. The climbing roses are pink and white, cascading over the iron railing just like she told me. A view of the harbor below that looks like it was made just for me at this moment.

I stop breathing.

It might not be hers—Probably isn't. But it could be.

It's close enough. Close enough to the stories. Close enough to the paintings she made of this exact view. The harbor, the boats, the colored buildings reflected in the water.

Close enough to make my eyes sting.

"Aria," Everett says quietly behind me.

I shake my head once because I can't talk yet.

He doesn't push. He just stands there. Close enough to reach for if I need him, and yet far enough to let me have this alone.

I stand on that terrace for a long time. Looking at the balcony and the roses that she’s painted. At the view my mother saw every morning before she met my father and left this place for a man with terrible French and too many peaches and a love story that ended in a car on the way home from her daughter's first gallery opening.

And that's when it hits me.

Like a wave breaking over my head and pulling me under before I take a breath.

I'm falling in love.

I'm falling in love with a man in the exact place my mother fell in love with my father. In the exact place she always told me I would find it—Here.

In the exact village. Under the same light, the same roses, the same view of the same harbor where she looked up from her easel and saw a man she’d marry.

And I'm the only one falling.

I'm falling in love with a man who told me not to want more. Who said this is a marriage on paper, Aria.