I left Paris on a blissful high.
Delicious food. Beautiful clothes. Amazing sex. I’d worked during my time there, but it’d felt like more of a vacation than some of my actual vacations.
Plus, the Legacy Ball planning was finally running smoothly, wedding prep was on track, and my relationship with Dante was the best it’d ever been.
Life was good.
“It was awful,” Sloane said as we exited the movie theater. “What was with the airplane scene? And the love confession. I would throw up if anyone compared me to the planet Venus, especially after knowing me for only three weeks. How could anyone possibly fall in love in three weeks?”
Isabella and I traded amused glances. We’d had to postpone our movie night due to my Paris trip, but we’d finally watched the rom-com Sloane had been hounding us about.
As expected, she hated it.
“Time works differently in fiction,” I said. “You know you can stop watching these movies any time, right?”
“I hate-watch them, Vivian. It’s therapeutic.”
“Mmhmm.”
I caught Isabella’s eye again, and we both turned away so Sloane couldn’t see our smiles.
“Anyway, I have to go home and feed The Fish before he dies on me.”
Sloane sounded like the task was equivalent to scrubbing the subway tunnels clean with a toothbrush. “I have enough on my plate without having to deal with a dead animal.”
She’d kept the goldfish her apartment’s previous tenant left behind, but she refused to give him a proper name since its presence in her life was “temporary.”
It’d been over a year.
Isabella and I knew better than to mention it, though, so we simply bid her good night and parted ways.
I stopped by Dante’s favorite Thai place on the way home. Greta was on her annual leave in Italy, so we were on our own, food-wise, for the next few weeks.
“Is Dante home yet?” I asked Edward when I returned to the penthouse.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s in his office.”
“Great. Thank you.” I’d tried to get Edward to call me by my first name when I first moved in, but I gave up after two months.
I knocked on Dante’s office door and waited for his “Come in” before I entered.
He sat behind his desk, his brow furrowed as he stared at something on his monitor. He must’ve just gotten home since he still wore his office suit.
“Hey.” I placed the food on the table and kissed him on the cheek. “It’s after work hours. You’re supposed to be relaxing.”
“It’s not after work hours in Asia.” He pushed back from his desk and rubbed his temple. He eyed the takeout bag on the desk. “What’s this?
“Dinner.” I retrieved the assorted plastic containers, napkins, and utensils. “From that Thai place you like so much on East 78th. I wasn’t sure what you were in the mood for, so I got curry puffs, basil stir fry, and…” I opened the last container with a flourish. “Their signature duck salad.”
Dante loved that duck salad. One time, he pushed back a call with the editor-in-chief of Mode de Vie just so he could eat it while it was still hot.
He stared at it, his expression inscrutable.
“Thank you, but I’m not hungry.” He turned back to his computer. “I really have to get this done in the next hour. Can you close the door on your way out?”
My smile melted at his brusque tone.
He’d been acting a little distant since we returned to New York two days ago, but tonight was the first time he’d been so blatantly dismissive.
“Okay.” I tried to keep my voice upbeat. “But you still have to eat. I’ll leave this here in case you get hungry later.” I paused, then added, “How’s work going? Overall, I mean.”
He was under a lot of stress with various supply chain issues and the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, of which the Russo Group was a sponsor. I couldn’t blame him for being a bit short-tempered.
“Fine.” He didn’t look away from his screen.
Tension lined his stiff shoulders and shadowed his features. He looked like a completely different person from the teasing, playful Dante in Paris.
“If anything’s wrong, you can talk to me about it,” I said softly. “You know that, right?”
Dante’s throat worked with a hard swallow.
When the silence stretched without any sign of a break, I gathered my portion of the dinner and ate it alone in the dining room.
The food smelled delicious, but when I swallowed it, it tasted like cardboard.
Dante’s broodiness didn’t improve over the next week.
Maybe it was work. Maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, it transformed him back into the cold, closed-off version of himself that made me want to tear my hair out.
The change in his attitude before and after Paris was so jarring I felt like we’d stumbled into a time portal and become stranded in the early days of our engagement.
He didn’t visit me for lunch, he was always “busy” during dinner, and he didn’t come to bed until long after I was asleep. When I woke up, he was already gone. We talked almost less than we had sex, which was never.
I tried to be understanding because everyone had their dark periods, but by the time the following Thursday rolled around, my patience had edged into the red zone.
The straw that broke the camel’s back came that evening, when I returned home from work to find Dante in the kitchen with Greta. She’d just gotten back from visiting her family in Naples, or Napoli, as she called it in Italian. However, she was already hard at work again—the marble island and counters groaned beneath the weight of various herbs, sauces, fish, and meats.
The smell beckoned me from the foyer, but when I entered the room, both she and Dante fell silent.
“Good evening, Miss Lau,” Greta said. When we were alone, she called me Vivian, but around other people, I was always Miss Lau.
“Good evening.” I scanned the banquet-worthy prep. “Are we having a party I don’t know about? This seems like a lot of food for two people.”
“It is,” she said after a brief pause. She frowned and flicked a glance at a stone-faced Dante before busying herself with the food.
My heart accelerated. “Are we having a party?”
“Of course not,” Dante said when Greta remained silent. He didn’t give me a chance to relax before he added, “Christian and his girlfriend are coming over for dinner tonight. They’re in town for a few days.”
“Tonight?” I glanced at the clock. “Dinner is in less than three hours!”
“Which is why I came home early.”
Breathe. Do not yell. Do not throw the bowl of tomatoes at his head.
“Were you going to tell me we’re expecting guests, or was this supposed to be a surprise?” My fingers strangled the strap of my bag. “Or am I not invited to the meal altogether?”
Greta chopped faster, her eyes fixed firmly on the garlic.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dante said.
Ridiculous? Ridiculous?
My patience snapped clean in half.
I’d tried my best to be sympathetic, but I was sick of him treating me like a stranger he was forced to share a house with. After the magic of Paris and the progress we’d made over the past few months, our relationship had suddenly regressed to where it’d been the summer of last year.
Then, it’d been understandable.
Now, after all we’d shared? It was unacceptable.
“Which part is ridiculous?” I demanded. “The part where I ask my fiancé for the common courtesy of informing me when we have guests over to our house? Or the part where we’ve grown so far apart in the space of one week that I wouldn’t be surprised if you did exclude me? I’d like to know, because I’m damn well not the one being unreasonable here!”
Greta’s knife hovered, suspended, over the cutting board while she gaped at me with wide eyes.
It was the first time I’d raised my voice in front of her since I moved in and only the fourth time I’d raised my voice, ever. The first had been when my sister “borrowed” and lost one of my favorite signed books in high school. The second had been when my parents forced me to break up with Heath, and the third had been the night Dante found Heath in the apartment.
Dante’s skin stretched taut over his cheekbones.
The tension was so stifling it took on a life of its own, crawling into my lungs and sinking into my skin. The air-conditioned room blazed like we were in the middle of the desert at high noon.
“I just remembered I’m expecting a grocery delivery soon,” Greta said.
“Let me check where they are.”
She dropped her knife and bolted faster than an Olympian competing for gold.
Normally, I would’ve been embarrassed about making a scene, but I was too fired up to care.
“It’s a dinner,” Dante growled. “Christian didn’t tell me he’d be in town until yesterday. You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”
“Then you could’ve told me he was coming over yesterday!” My voice rose again before I forced more oxygen through my nose. “It’s not about the dinner, Dante. It’s about your refusal to communicate like a normal person.
I thought we were past this.” Emotion clogged my throat. “We promised we wouldn’t do this. Act like strangers. Shut down whenever things got hard.
We’re supposed to be partners.”
Dante rubbed a hand over his face. When it fell away, I glimpsed the conflict in his eyes—remorse and guilt at war with frustration and something else that chilled the breath in my lungs.
“There are some things you’re better off not knowing, mia cara.” The endearment I’d initially despised and grown to love barely touched my skin before it dissolved. Soft yet rough, like the churn of waves in a raging storm.
The wistful notes lingered for an extra beat before his face shut down again.
“I’ll see you at dinner.”
He walked out, leaving me with a pit in my stomach and the unshakeable sense that our relationship had somehow been fundamentally altered.
