★ANGELINA★
Thirty days is enough time to learn a person's outline.
Not the inside of them—that takes much longer, takes proximity and patience and the willingness to sit in silence without filling it. But the outline. The shape they make in a room. The way they move through the world when they think no one particularly important is watching.
I had thirty days before the wedding and I used them the way I use most things.
We met three more times in formal settings. A dinner at a restaurant that was clearly chosen for its privacy rather than its food, though the food was good. A brief meeting at a lawyer's office to finalize documentation. A walkthrough of the estate that was efficient and businesslike and told me almost nothing about the man and almost everything about how he'd chosen to live.
Luciano Ferrara was the same in every room. That was the first thing I learned about his outline. Some people have a public version and a private version and the distance between those two things tells you something important about them. He didn't seem to have that distance. He was the same sitting across a formal dinner table as he was signing documents—generating exactly the warmth of a man who had decided warmth was not currently on the agenda.
He was also, and I noted this privately and said nothing about it to anyone except Cora, not what I'd expected.
"What did you expect?" Cora asked. We were in my bedroom, three weeks into the thirty days, and she was sitting on my bed with the expression she gets when she's prepared to have feelings on my behalf.
"I don't know. Older, yes. Or-" I thought about it. "More obviously frightening."
"He's not frightening?"
He's… contained. There's a difference." I folded a dress into the open suitcase. "Frightening means the danger is visible. Contained means it's there but he's decided not to show it. That's actually more, but just different."
Cora stared at me. "Lina. You're analyzing your future husband like he's a recipe."
"I analyze everything like it's a recipe."
"That's concerning."
"That's practical." I put the dress in the suitcase. "I need to understand what I'm walking into."
"And what are you walking into?"
I thought about the estate walkthrough. The way every room was right but nothing was lived in. The yard he'd mentioned which turned out to be a generous understatement for a significant amount of land that had been maintained and completely ignored at the same time. Good bones, I'd thought, walking through it. Everything was good bones, nothing given the chance to be more than that.
"A house that's forgotten how to be a home," I said. "And a man who probably has too."
Cora was quiet for a moment. Then: "You feel sorry for him."
I sighed. "I don't feel sorry for him. He's not someone you feel sorry for, he wouldn't know what to do with it." I closed the suitcase. "I just understand the situation a little better than I did before."
She looked at me however she looks at me when she thinks I'm being braver than I'm letting on. I looked back at her until she stopped.
The hardest conversation of the thirty days was not with Cora. It was with my father, two weeks before the wedding, when I came downstairs at midnight and found him at the kitchen table with a glass of something and an expression I'd only seen on him a handful of times in my life.
"Papa."
He looked up. "You should be sleeping."
"So should you." I sat across from him. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong."
"You're sitting alone in the dark."
He looked at his glass. "I keep thinking you're going to wake up and realize what you agreed to and be angry with me."
I looked at him, caught off guard by the rawness of it. My father, Dante Belli, who had navigated forty years of the most complicated rooms in this city without flinching sat across from me looking like a man waiting to be found guilty of something.
"I'm not angry," I said.
"You should be. You're twenty-four years old and I'm handing you to a man you've met three times to solve a problem I helped create."
"You didn't create it alone."
"Angelina-"
"And I said yes." I reached across and put my hand over his. "I said yes, Papa. You asked me and I said yes. That matters."
He looked at my hand on his for a long moment. "Your grandmother would say I raised you too practical."
"My grandmother would say you raised me exactly right." I squeezed his hand. "I'm going to be fine. I need you to believe that."
He didn't look entirely convinced. But he turned his hand over and held mine, and that was enough for that night.
The night before the wedding I sat in my childhood bedroom for the last time as a person with only one name. I looked at everything in it. The shelves, the photographs, the small collected evidence of a life I'd built inside these walls. I was going to miss this room. I was allowed to miss it.
I said my prayers. I said the extra one, the same one I'd been saying for thirty days.
I turned the light off.
In the morning I put on the yellow dress because yellow was mine and I was still me regardless of what the day held, and I went downstairs to become Angelina Ferrara with the same practicality and the same quiet private courage that had gotten me through the last thirty days.
My father was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He looked at me for a long moment.
"You look like your mother," he said. "When she was happy."
I smiled and took his arm.
"Let's go," I said.