Page 87 of Casanova LLC

“She also made me join the choir. To make friends. The comfort, the inner peace, she used to get from sermons and blessings… I felt when I sang. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I was any good. But it wasn’t about that. Good or bad. It wasn’t even about the choir. It was about feeling connected. To myself and to something more than myself. Something private. Sacred. Safe.”

“So why you stop?”

“I went to college. I didn’t have to go to church anymore. Now I just sing in the shower. But it isn’t the same. I haven’t felt that feeling of being at home in myself. Until now. Here.”

He sat back and lifted his coffee to his mouth. He inclined his head at my hand. “You have taken off your ring.” I knew it was not a discovery. I knew by the way he said it that he’d probably noticed it on the pier.

I dipped my biscotti into my coffee and bit off the wet end. “It was time.”

He took a long sip. “You are complicated.”

I jokingly screwed up my face. “Thank you?”

He chuckled. “What I mean to say is, widows. They are tricky for us. Because they are, uh…vulnerabile? How you say?—”

“Vulnerable. Very similar.”

“Sì, vulnerable. They are happy to be loved for a weekend. But they can become…” He snapped his fingers. “It is too early for me, scusa, my old brain, uh confusa.”

“Confused. Again, very similar.” Before he could continue, I put my hand on top of his. “I’m not confused.”

He looked into my eyes. “But of course. You are too smart. Love is such a…small word with such big meaning.”

“True.”

“She is like water. It can take us anywhere. It sustains us. Comforts us. Quenches our thirst. And yet, we drown in it if we cannot swim.”

Why was he saying this to me? Had Alessandro said something about me? Or, more consequential, about himself? Or was Jacopo trying to tell me something about himself? I took a sip of coffee. “Have you ever found yourself in dangerous waters?” For the first time since meeting him, I saw him unprepared to speak. “Forgive me, that’s really none of my?—”

“No, Bella. You have every right. I opened the door, how can you not look inside?” He took a bite of biscotti, had a drink of coffee, and wiped his mouth. Sighed. “Once. There was one time when I—I believe the saying is—had to sink or swim.”

“What happened?”

“What could only happen. I could not give her what she wanted. Or what I might have wanted for that matter.”

“Which was?”

“Me stesso. This one, not so similar. Myself.” He brushed crumbs off the table into his open palm. “She was a widow. So you see…” He made a there you have it face. “I could not sacrifice Alessandro’s future, the legacy. This would be a knife in the heart of time.”

“Wait, so you loved a woman and?—”

“Not a woman, the woman. This is our sempre, our always. Our Forever.”

“What is?”

“The woman who appears to each Casanova who makes him question who he is and what he wants. To choose to love one woman would require rejection of everything we are. Everything we have been made to be.”

“And you couldn’t do that?”

“For more than two hundred years not one Casanova has done this. Turned away from the legacy. From our service.”

“But the legacy is about love. What value is a legacy that robs the keeper of the very thing it’s meant to inspire?”

He chuckled. It was indulgent. “We are who we are, Bella. You can change a man, but you cannot change history.”

Was this a warning? A veiled and kind and illuminating one, but a warning nonetheless? “How do you know your Forever?”

He gave a silent laugh, dropped his head to his chest, closed his eyes. Then, after a moment, he looked back up at me from under a lowered brow. He gave a melancholy smile. “You know.” He finished his coffee and took a revitalizing breath. “I think maybe I will go to Sicily for what’s left of the winter. Do some scuba diving. Maybe Portofino for the summer.”

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