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The woman didn’t move except that her eyes lit and the corners of her smile pulled up ever so slightly. Then, squaring her shoulders again, she said, “No.”
Nicolo wanted to throw his arms down in frustration. Barging into the back would win him no points with Adeline, but he had to see her. He had to tell her how he felt.
“You can tell her yourself,” the woman added, her smile growing.
Leaping over the counter that separated them, Nicolo took the woman’s face in his hands and planted a big kiss on her cheek before rushing through the door that led to the back of the shop.
He wove his way past mountains of supplies and works-in-progress until finally, toward the back, space opened up for a collection of women to sit while they worked. It was at that point that he froze. He didn’t speak. He watched, and he saw.
Adeline sat with her head bent over a pillow in her lap. Atop the pillow was a piece of paper sewn on cloth, and on top of that paper Adeline was stitching the delicate design of a butterfly. The thread was thin and every stitch she made only grew the butterfly by the merest amount, yet her focus remained and she kept working. To him, the work that was left to be done on her butterfly seemed insurmountable, but if it was, that message had not reached her nimble fingers. To Adeline, the impossible was possible and the improbable was an absolute.
She can move mountains… and she can build my world.
One of the ladies lifted a head and saw him, and her work stopped, then another and another. Soon it was only Adeline who worked. Finally she, too, stopped, looked to either side of her and then followed the other women’s gazes to him.
“Nicolo,” she whispered and let her now-still hands rest in her lap.
“I am an idiot. I am a fool,” Nicolo said, stepping into the half-circle created by the women’s chairs. He got down on his knees before Adeline and took one of her hands in his own. “But whatever I am, I am a better man with you in my life.”
“I’m so sorry,” Adeline said, tears welling in her eyes.
“I’m not. I’m stubborn and pigheaded and rarely ever look at life past the end of my nose. If I had sold the Romano del Mare to be destroyed, I would have been haunted by it for the rest of my life. My grandparents poured their entire lives into the resort and I was ready to bulldoze it to the ground just because the going had gotten a little hard. I don’t want to do that now. I want to have more to show for my life than to destroy the legacy left for me. It would have left a hole in my soul that I would have never been able to fill. You saved me from that fate, Adeline. You pushed me into keeping what is dear to me by giving me the chance to give it up. In that moment I realized that I wasn’t ready to see her go.”
Nicolo brushed a tear from Adeline’s cheek. “I’m not ready to see you go either, bedda. You’re a part of me. I know that I’m a foolish man, but will you give me another chance?”
Adeline pushed her lace into the lap of the woman next to her and then threw herself into Nicolo’s arms, knocking him backward. With her on top and him pinned beneath her, she rained kisses down upon his face to mingle with her still-falling tears.
“Shoo! Shoo!” the tall woman from the front of the shop said, clapping her hands at them both as the other women laughed.
“Take me home,” Adeline demanded of Nicolo, following with a big kiss on his lips.
Nicolo didn’t even have to think of where she meant. His mind did not imagine his plane. He saw her and him. Everything else was a blur. The rest didn’t matter.
13
Nicolo
Nicolo looked at his ringing phone and moaned. It was his older brother, Gianpierre. Despite Leonardo's earlier words of support, Nicolo already caught an ear full from him about his decision to fully renovate the Romano del Mare rather than do simple repairs or sell her as a doomed building, and he didn’t want to hear it from Gianpierre, too. The man cared nothing for the resort their grandfather had built. All he cared about was getting elbow deep in medieval architecture, and while the Romano del Mare was the perfect site for him to do just that, the man avoided working in Italy like the plague. But, that was his issue and not something Nicolo was willing to think about at the moment.
Ignoring the call, he allowed it to go to voicemail. Then, picking up the phone, he called Adeline. The restoration of the resort was snowballing, and he needed to know that she had his back. With the development project in India heavy into the design phase, he didn’t have time to oversee every detail of what was Adeline’s passion project. He needed to know that she was willing to step up and take control during the times that he was away—which was most of the time of late.
Adeline’s phone went to voicemail, just as he’d allowed his phone to do when Gianpierre had called him.
Nicolo scowled at his phone. He’d been in India for the last two and a half weeks. He’d thought that he would get to sp
end time with Adeline when he returned to Sicily—but she’d been “busy” every time that he’d reached out to her. While he’d been gone to India, she’d flown to Spain for a meeting with the real estate agency to which she’d applied. Even though she’d made them wait, they still wanted her.
“That’s fine,” he reassured himself. “If she moves to Spain, I’ll go between India and Spain. Nothing changes. She’ll still be my girl.” Those were the words that came out of his mouth, but not even he believed them.
Everything was changing. All three days that he’d been back in Sicily, he’d used nearly every waking hour to address concerns relating to the renovation. He had thought that Adeline would be his feet on the ground, his on-point person to handle the day to day issues that arose, but she was becoming less and less available to oversee the project. He’d been counting on her to be able to handle it so that he could continue his work in India. Without her to fill in the gaps, he’d have to restructure his entire life.
Picking up the phone, he sent Adeline a text. “Dinner tonight?” He watched the phone’s screen for a response. Little bubbles rippled across it to show that Adeline was typing. Then, the little bubbles stopped, then started again. This went on for several minutes, but no message appeared. When Nicolo was almost ready to give up and call her again, a message finally blipped into existence on his screen.
“Sure.”
Nicolo’s stomach cramped. There was more that she wasn’t saying, and there was no way that it could be good.
Pulling up Google, Nicolo calculated the flight hours between India and Spain. It was longer than India to Sicily, but he would have to make it work.
