Page 49 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

“I found her family,” Dioni said quietly. “Grazia’s mother and father are still there. And a great many brothers and sisters and cousins. But it was her parents I spoke to most.”

And if she had detonated a bomb, or slapped him across the face, Alceu did not think he could have been more shocked.

He was reeling again, and he was no fonder of the sensation. “You should not go sticking your fingers in wounds like that,” he managed to say.

“There is no ill will, Alceu,” she told him softly. “Not toward you. They knew exactly who your father was. Just as I knew whoyouwere. And they knew their daughter too.”

“You should not...” he started again.

“They know who to blame,” Dioni told him, urgently. “And everything else is the sadness, the grief, for what was lost.What a waste.That’s what her mother said. Grazia was a happy girl with a future ahead of her, by all accounts, when your father got his hooks in her. Why should there be no futures at all, all these years later? Why should you suffer for your father’s sins? Surely the best revenge of all is to live well, Alceu. Even in Sicily.”

He could feel the dance moving around them. It was as if they were one more pillar in the middle of this ballroom.

It was as if he was still out to sea, bobbing up and down in that open water with no sense of where the shore was or how to swim there.

But Dioni had just shown him that if he looked up, he could see the stars.

And when he looked at her, he saw galaxies.

So he took her hands in his. Then he leaned down and set his mouth to hers.

And then kissed her, with all of the longing and need, the wonder and hope, the terror and the desire inside of him.

“I will disappoint you,” he told her. There against her mouth.

But this was Dioni, so she smiled. “I will disappoint you right back. And then we will laugh. Perhaps we will fight first, then find our way to each other again. You will make me cry. I will hurt your feelings. And over time, we will do less of that, I hope. And more listening. Learning.Loving, Alceu.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“I read a lot of books,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“You forget that I knew your father.Howare you sure?”

“Because,” she said, her voice low and only for him. Just as she had been. “My mother gave her life for me. It was a gift, and I believe it was meant to be shared. We will not squander it, Alceu. We will savor it. No matter what it takes.”

“No matter what it takes,” he heard himself agree.

Then he kissed her again, and again.

And only stopped when the music did, and only long enough to lean down, and lift her in his arms the way he liked. Then, without a single thought for anyone who might be watching them—or considering a punch in the mouth—carried her off.

Straight into that happy ending she was so sure they had coming.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LIKEHISFATHER,Tolis Vaccaro was born in his own sweet time, and was unyielding and uncompromising from the start.

Dioni loved him to distraction, immediately and completely, and not only because she lived through the birth andgotto meet him. But it was Alceu who was besotted.

And it was as if that was all he needed. As if it took Tolis to make his heart open wide like that.

“I love him,” he said as they all lay together in the bed, the baby between them and all of that awe on Alceu’s face. But he was looking at her. “And oh, Dioni,camurria mia, I love you too.”

She laughed, and then she kissed him. “I know you do, you impossible man. I have always known.”

And after that, after the stone statue that was Alceu crumbled and became a man, all things that seemed impossible before became doable.

Marcella did not exactly turn into the gray-haired stereotype of a grandmother overnight—all baking and cooking and the like—but she, too, fell in love with the baby.

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