I gingerly took the stack of papers from her hands and started reading through them. Distantly, I heard the therapist go back to helping Kate with her exercises.
Mateo’s bright, high voice hovered around the edges of my senses, but it receded into the background as I looked over the brand-new deal that Grazia had brought with her to the hospital.
When I had read enough to be sure of the nature and the intent of this new business proposal, I looked at Grazia with one brow lifted in inquiry. “Was this all your idea?” I ask.
She grins at me. “Mostly. The parts that involve Marco was his idea, of course.”
“It’s a good deal,” I say approvingly. “For all of us.”
“I thought so too,” she says with a smug smile on her face.
“I’ll send copies over to the lawyers first, but I don’t see why we can’t make this work for all of us,” I tell Grazia, taking out my phone and starting to take pictures of the pages of the documents.
Grazia doesn’t say anything back. She leans against the wall beside me, watching Kate struggle with her balance. Mateo jumps up and down as she manages to sit all the way down onto the floor and then climb back up with relative ease.
“I’m sorry that she was hurt,” Grazia says quietly beside me.
I shoot her a quick glance before returning to the work of transferring the pages of the document to my legal team. “Why?” I ask in an abstracted way.
“It’s my fault just as much as anyone’s,” she says regretfully. “I could have stopped all of this when you crashed my wedding.” She eyes me closely and I feel her gaze boring into me. I refuse to meet it. “You could have just talked to us, you know,” she says. “Marco would have let you see her.”
“But I didn’t know that,” I reply, my tone a little vague as I type up an email with directions for the lawyers to review the documents and compare the business assets in the deal with the real value of the routes.
“Because you didn’t talk to us,” she insists, her tone stern.
I sigh and finally meet her gaze. “Yes, I guess I could have talked to you. However, Marco had spirited her away and hidden her from everyone, including her family. I hadn’t heard from her in seven years. I didn’t know what your intentions were and I didn’t want to expose her to the chance that she might get hurt.”
Grazia sighs. “I suppose that’s fair.” She’s watching Kate again, but then she meets my gaze. “Promise to at least ask what’s up next time you want to be angry about something?” She holds out her small, slim hand to me. I see that her nails are painted bright red.
I look at her hand for a moment, then shake it. “Deal,” I tell her. But then I hold up a hand. “But that deal is only good with you. I refuse to make any such deal with your brothers.”
She laughs. “That’s fair,” she says in reply. “I don’t make deals with them directly either.”
“How did you trick them into agreeing to this deal?” I ask her, leaning back in my chair and holding out the documents.
She sighs. “My brothers aren’t very detail-oriented. I saw a lot of potential in the deal that was much more promising than what we would get if we just stole your trade routes from you. We will be making a lot more money with this arrangement. Once they saw the numbers, they had to agree that I was right.”
“Why aren’t you running the family business, Grazia?” I ask her, honestly curious. She was much smarter than her brothers.
It seemed stupid to let them run the business when she was clearly far more capable than they were.
She shakes her head a little. “I guess I don’t really know. My Nonna always said that ladies did their best work in the shadows, though. I think she knew that I would secretly pull all the strings in the long run anyhow and it’s safer not to be the face of the business, you know?”
I nod. That I did understand all too well.
I thought of my brother and my stomach soured.
I would never want anyone to have to go through the kinds of things I had just to keep control of our company.
Grazia was probably right that her brothers might as well bear the brunt of all the toughest decisions so she could have a better life and a much clearer conscience.
“So,” Grazia says abruptly. “Are we invited to the wedding?”
At the word “wedding”, Kate’s attention is captured and she looks over at us. “Are you letting Grazia plan our wedding now, too?”
I laugh at this. “Should we? She seems to be very good at planning things.”
Kate smiles a little and chuckles. “She has certainly proven her worth in that department lately.”