“Did I?” Miguel caught her hand, pressed it to his cheek. This woman who’d taught him that love wasn’t weakness but the greatest strength a man could possess. “Sometimes I think I failed him the moment I let him build those walls.”
“He was five. He was surviving.”
“He’s twenty-eight. He’s drowning.” Miguel turned to study the list his son had left behind. A smudge marked where Aivan’s thumb had touched one name. Again and again and again. “Think the Posada girl has a chance?”
Selena’s smile held secrets. The same smile that had undone Miguel fifteen years ago when she’d looked at him over Olivio’s homework and said,“Your son needs more than a tutor, Mr. Cannizzaro. He needs a family.”
“I think,” she said, measuring each word like ingredients in a recipe, “that sometimes the heart chooses when the mind isn’t looking. And our son has been not-looking at that girl for years.”
From somewhere in the house came the sound of quick footsteps on marble. Too light for the guards, too hurried for the older staff.
Sienah Posada. Had to be. The girl moved through their home like a benevolent ghost, always finding things that needed doing, always disappearing before anyone could thank her. Miguel had watched her watch his son, those tragic brown eyes following Aivan’s every move while trying desperately not to be caught looking.
“One month,” Miguel murmured. “Think that’s enough time for a miracle?”
Selena kissed his temple, her lips soft against his graying hair. “I fell in love with you in one evening, didn’t I?”
“That was different. You were saving me.”
“Maybe,” his wife said, gliding toward the door with that dancer’s grace that still made his chest tight after all these years. “Or maybe every love story is about two people saving each other. They just don’t always realize it at the time.”
The door whispered shut, leaving Miguel alone with his cold espresso and the weight of decades.
Through the window, he caught movement in the garden. Aivan’s silhouette against the dying sun, standing motionless by his mother’s rose bushes. The ones Paulette had planted the year before she died, now wild and overgrown because no one had the heart to prune them. Thorns everywhere. Beautiful and dangerous and impossible to tend without bleeding.
His son stood there for several minutes before turning to walk back toward the garage. Same measured steps. Same rigid control. Same walls that had kept him safe and slowly suffocating for twenty-three years.
Choose well, my son,Miguel thought.May you have the courage to choose the one who already sees you drowning...before it’s too late.
In the distance, an engine roared to life, Aivan driving away from another confrontation he couldn’t win with logic alone.
Miguel picked up the list, smoothing out the smudge where his son’s thumb had betrayed him. Eight names. Seven strategic alliances.
One wild hope.
He reached for his phone to text Olivio.Your brother needs us united on this. No funding outside official channels.
Olivio:The Posada girl?
Even from Toronto, his younger son saw everything. Always had.
Miguel:Maybe. Selena thinks so.
Olivio:Then it’s already decided. That woman could convince water to flow uphill.
Miguel smiled despite the ache in his chest. His boys. So different, yet both shaped by loss in their own ways. Olivio had turned outward, charming the world into submission. Aivan had turned inward, building walls so high even the wings of angels might not be strong enough to soar past it.
But Selena was right. She usually was.
Sometimes love crept in through cracks you didn’t know existed.
Sometimes it had been there all along, waiting for the right pressure to make itself known.
And sometimes a father had to play the villain to save his son from a lifetime of the very coldness that had nearly destroyed them both.
The list lay on his desk like a declaration of war. Or maybe, if they were lucky, a white flag of surrender to the one force even a Cannizzaro couldn’t control.
Outside, the roses bloomed wild in the dying light. Thorns and beauty and twenty-three years of untended growth. And somewhere in Monaco, his eldest son was about to discover that the heart he’d buried at five years old had never stopped beating.
