Page 169 of Valentino

Amanda gave the truth back to me.

I turn back to Chiara, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect. "I need you to do me a favor."

Her eyebrows lift. "Twenty years of silence and the first thing you ask me is a favor." She laughs then, soft and disbelieving, and for one second I hear the girl she used to be. 'Of course. Anything. What is it?"

I look at Amanda one more time.

She is watching a pigeon like it has offended her personally, one hand braced on the step beside her, the other loose between her knees. She has no idea I am looking at her and no idea that I am standing here because of her in more ways than one.

For once, there is no exit to count. No room to clear. No threat to measure before I speak.

There is only Chiara in front of me, Amanda on the steps, and the first thing I have wanted in years that does not feel like penance.

I turn back to Chiara.

"I need you with me when I ask her to stay."

Amanda

Valentino walks back toward me across the piazza, and the crowd just parts for him. Everybody peels out of his path without seeming to notice they're doing it. That walk should be illegal. It's the walk every mafia movie has been chasing since Brando, and here it is, live and in person, aimed directly at me. If he were anyone else I'd have wet myself somewhere around the fountain.

Instead I sit there on the warm stone of the Spanish Steps with my chin in my hand and watch him come, because he's mine, and watching him move is the closest thing I have to a religion.

He stops one step below me, which puts us at eye level. His eyes are dark and steady and locked on mine with the kind of focus he usually reserves for exits and threats.

"Marry me," he says.

The words land and slide right off, like my brain has a no-vacancy sign up.

"Excuse me?"

"Marry me."

A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it, loud enough that a pigeon two steps down takes offense and leaves.

"Babe. Oh my God. You have no idea how men propose. There's supposed to be a ring. Candles. Possibly a string quartet hiding behind a hedge⁠—"

He doesn't blink. He doesn't smile. He just keeps looking at me with that terrible patience, the kind he uses when he's already decided something and is simply waiting for the world to catch up.

The laugh dies in my throat.

Oh.

Oh, he means it. This isn't banter. My heart does this slow, painful roll in my chest, and to my horror my eyes go hot.

"Oh," I say. "Yeah. I will marry you." My voice comes out softer than I planned, so I shore it up with the truth. "Honestly? I always kind of thought we should be married. Like the universe was just being slow about the paperwork."

I smile at him, and something I see a loosening around the eyes that I've learned to read like scripture.

"Good," he says.

Then he grabs my wrist and pulls me off the steps.

He turns and walks, and I'm towed behind him like luggage, my sneakers slapping stone, the evening crowd blurring past in a smear of linen and sunburn. Behind us, Chiara laugh.

"Valentino. Valentino. What the hell is going on?" I ask.

"We're getting married," he says, without slowing down, without looking back, like he's reporting weather.