Page 5 of Cherry on Top

“I said I would,” Enzo promised.

“What is your schedule like?” she asked, all official now. “Can we get on it? There’s a perfect wall here, you know the old hardware store . . .” She laughed. “Of course you do. It’s been remodeled inside, and the brick restored, and oh, you’d love it. The perfect place for you to paint a mural in Indigo Bay.”

He probably would love it. It probably would be perfect.

That was the problem with his mother. She knew him too well and knew exactly what kind of treat to lay in the trap.

“Uh . . .”

Enzo had a feeling he knew where this was going.

An inevitable kind of feeling.

Who’d spilled the beans? Luca? Or Oliver?

The other day when they’d talked, he’d told Luca about the suddenly empty slot in his schedule. A building had been delayed in the construction phase, and as a result, the mural he’d been supposed to paint had fallen through. Truthfully he hadn’t decided what he was going to do about those empty weeks, yet, but he’d toyed with the idea of going and staying with Chiara and Ilaria, Luca’s sisters in San Francisco, but he hadn’t yet decided. That was the beauty of his schedule. It was up to him.

Of course, Luca might not have been the one to tell Giana. It could very well have been Oliver, who seemed to share Luca’s brain, these days.

“I heard about that project that fell through. Luca mentioned it.” If Giana had demanded he come home or acted like it was an inevitability, it would’ve been so easy to turn her down.

To tell her something else had come up, even if it hadn’t.

But the hope in her voice made it impossible to do that.

“It just happened, and I haven’t had time to think about what it means.” All true. The schedule change had happened when he’d been right in the middle of this mural, lost to it the way he was always lost to his best pieces.

All he’d had time to do during the thick of it was paint and fall into bed, after.

“I could send you pictures of the wall,” Giana said excitedly.

Enzo rationalized with himself that he’d been meaning to come home, anyway, one of these days. And wouldn’t it be nice to spend the summer in a place where he wasn’t fighting the cloud cover and the drizzling rain, like he’d been in Seattle?

More than nice to enjoy the kind of blazingly hot summer he’d grown up with. Spend a few days at the beach, soaking in the salt water and the sun?

If the old hardware store really had been restored, Giana wasn’t wrong. It would be a great spot for a mural.

Enzo knew he could be stubborn, but he wasn’t blindly stupid.

“Send the pictures,” he said, resigning himself, while also reminding himself that it wouldn’t be all bad to go back to Indigo Bay. He’d see Luca and Oliver again.

She must’ve known that would be his first request, because his phone beeped immediately.

“Not wasting any time, huh?” he teased.

“You’re a very important man now. It’s not every day you have an unexpected opening on your schedule,” she teased right back, and for a second, Enzo felt swamped with love and something deeper and more binding. All the history they shared.

The history that kept tugging him back, when he’d been sure he’d cut the cord.

“Let me look,” Enzo said, pulling up the pictures. And she hadn’t lied. It was a gorgeous building. Not very big, easily completed in the empty slot in his schedule. He would have plenty of time to relax, too. The brick was nice and clean, not much damage, and whoever had remodeled the old hardware store had cleared out the ugly, broken-down dumpster that had become more of neighborhood trash heap and then scrubbed the sidewalk, removing even the most stubborn of the stains.

It boded well, and Enzo felt that little artistic tingle he always got when he began to get excited about a project.

“I told you, it’s perfect,” Giana said as he flicked through the pictures she’d sent.

He wanted to argue and say it wasn’t, but she’d planned this well. It was perfect, and she knew it.

“I’ll do it,” Enzo said. “I’ll even waive my normal fee.”

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