Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Silvano had very precise ways of doing that—I learned—when I tried to be helpful and load it one day. I always figure that, you know, in the washer was what mattered.
Oh, how very wrong I had been.
There was an order for everything inside of it.
And the man insisted on keeping the knives in the holder, pointy side up.
“We covered that,” I reminded him as we moved into the apartment. “I’ll just never load the dishwasher again,” I said, giving him a saccharine smile.
“Like her already,” a male voice called, making me turn to find another man standing there. I hadn’t met Cosimo yet, but I figured that was the only other person who would be at their mom’s house for dinner. “You know this fuck once kept an eye on my place when I was out of town and reorganized my cabinets?” he asked.
“To be fair,” a woman said, moving next to her man, “it really is all much more functional now. I’m Halle,” she said, giving me a warm smile.
Right.
Halle.
The woman who was on Cosimo’s jury when he’d been tried for murder.
“Millie,” I said, giving her what I hoped wasn’t an insecure smile.
“Come on,” Halle said, nodding her head toward the kitchen. “Let’s let the boys talk while we talk about them,” she said, leading me to the edge of the kitchen, and handing me a glass of wine. “I never thought I’d see Silvano with a woman,” Halle admitted. Then, to his mom, “Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry. I worried for many years that neither of my boys would allow themselves to fall in love. I think, whether they would ever admit it or not, that they didn’t think they were capable, thanks to their father.”
“I won’t say Cosimo was easy to love,” Halle admitted. “But that’s only because of those walls he had up for so long. And Silvano…” Halle said, shaking her head.
“Can kind of come off like a giant jerk?” I supplied, getting a laugh out of Halle, and a smile out of Silvano’s mom. “He does kind of. But I don’t know… from the start I’ve always kind of found it charming. Like he’s just this big, grumpy, curmudgeon. Who is a complete neat freak…”
“Am I a neat freak, or are you kind of a slob?” Silvano asked, making me turn to look at him over my shoulder.
“You’re a neat freak,” I said with certainty. “I loaded the dishwasher wrong once,” I told the women, getting little laughs out of them.
“It sounds like loading the dishwasher is his job from now on then,” his mom said, getting a smile out of me.
“That’s exactly what I said,” I agreed, nodding.
The rest of the evening was full of Silvano’s mom gushing about what the boys had been like when they were young, making the grown men shift in their chairs and look uncomfortable.
Baby pictures came out.
And I found myself wondering what a baby of ours might look like. My eyes. His dark hair. That would be a gorgeous combination. Or his eyes and my hair.
By the time we were going home—with enough leftover lasagne to eat for a week, which was great because it truly was the best lasagne I’d ever had in my life—I was rolling my eyes at the me I’d been a few hours before who’d been so worried about being accepted into his inner circle.
His mom was so welcoming. And warm.
I understood how Silvano had such a sweet, loving side, despite the horrors his step-father had subjected him, his mother, and his brother to.
Sure, he hid all that mushy stuff under that hard outer shell of pessimism, sarcasm, and brusque nature. But it made it all the more amazing to be able to be one of the few people he let under that shell, that he let see the real him.
And it had only been, like, what, two months?
I couldn’t wait to see what other parts of him I would get to see as more time passed.
Silvano - 3 months
“Mills, we don’t have to go in there,” I told her, reaching to squeeze her thigh as we sat in the car outside of a warehouse.
“Yes, I do,” she said, sniffling hard, making me realize she was already crying.
“For what? To prove you can? The fuck is the point of that?”
“I need to know if he’s still there,” she said, looking at the warehouse as she wiped her cheeks.
“I’ll just go.”
If he was in there, it wasn’t like it would be my first decomposed body. I’d once dug up a corpse I’d buried months before because I learned a development was about to be built in that area, and I wasn’t sure the body would have wasted away enough for any possible evidence to be gone. Or enough time had passed to wipe clean memories of people who might link the dead guy to a member of my Family.