Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
But the best thing, the thing that made all the other things feel like footnotes—-
It was Olivio.
It was Olivio, and the way he'd changed, and the way the change had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the God she'd been praying he would find. Because this time, when they'd been sitting on the balcony last week with their mismatched mugs and the blue ceramic plate and the morning doing what Toronto mornings did when they decided to cooperate, it had been Olivio, not Chelsea, who'd spoken first.
Her parents were with Him now, in Paradise, he'd told her quietly. And one day, she and Olivio, they would join them, too.
He'd said it the way he said everything that mattered, without fanfare, without performance, just the voice of a man who'd followed the evidence to its conclusion the way the book had described, and had arrived somewhere he hadn't planned to go and had no intention of leaving.
Chelsea hadn't been able to speak for a full minute after that.
Because it meant he believed now. Truly believed. And because it also meant that the man she loved had just promised her the one thing no amount of money or power or Cannizzaro influence could buy: that this wasn't the end. That they had forever. And that her parents, who she'd been missing every single day since she woke up, were somewhere she would see them again.
And next month, they'd be in Boston. A charity golf tournament, Olivio had told her, the kind of event where families like the Cannizzaros and the Marchettis gathered to do what powerful families did, which was play golf badly and make deals on the back nine. Chelsea had never met the Marchettis, but she'd heard enough from Sienah and Shayla to know they were the real deal, the kind of family whose name carried weight in rooms that most people didn't know existed.
She'd been thinking about this when she turned to her husband and asked, "Are there any dos and don'ts I should know about? For the Marchettis?"
Olivio was quiet for a moment. Then: "Two rules."
"Okay."
"Don't look at any of them for more than five seconds."
Chelsea started to laugh.
Then stopped.
Because Olivio wasn't laughing.
"Seriously?" She searched his face, and the look she found there was one she'd never quite seen before, total sincerity layered with something that looked remarkably like irritation. "Why? Are they...are they dangerous? Are they violent? Should I be—-"
"Because," Olivio said, in an unusually irritated voice, "all of them are ridiculously good-looking, and I happen to be an extremely jealous husband."
Oh, Olivio.
She would've teased him some more, would've leaned into him and called him ridiculous and watched the irritation flicker into something warmer the way it always did when she refused to take his possessiveness seriously, but there wasn't any time. They'd made it to the end of the path, and the grass was soft under her feet, and she slowly knelt.
Two headstones. Side by side. Her father's name and her mother's, and the dates that marked the boundaries of lives that had been too short and too full and too important to ever be contained by stone.
She placed the flowers between them. White lilies, because her father had always brought her mother white lilies, and the memory of that, him coming through the door on Friday evenings with the stems wrapped in newspaper and her mother pretending to be surprised even though it happened every week, had lived in Chelsea through three years of silence and eight months of rebuilding and nine days of falling in love and one afternoon of having her heart broken and the month after that, the slow and grace-filled month of being put back together.
She'd never been able to visit before. The hurt had been too big, too close, too much like drowning. But everything was different now. Not because the hurt was gone. It wasn't. It lived in her the way her limp lived in her, a permanent negotiation between who she'd been and who she was. But the hurt had company now. It shared space with the knowledge that this wasn't goodbye.
It was see you again, on the other side.
She knelt there for a while, and the wind moved through the elms, and she didn't pray out loud because some prayers were just breathing, and God heard those too.
"Thank you for being with me," she said softly as she rose, and her husband's hand was already there, steadying her the way it always was, the way it always would be.
"For as long as we are in this world," Olivio said, "I will always be with you."
"So romantic."
"You haven't seen anything yet," he mocked.
She laughed. Who knew Olivio Cannizzaro could be like this? Who knew the man who spoke in complete sentences and controlled the pace of every room he entered could also be the man who teased his wife on the way to a cemetery and held her hand while she knelt in the grass and made her laugh on the walk back to the car with an expression on his face that said he was not remotely joking and was also completely in love?