What is the price of my agency? Does it have to be so expensive?
“I’m sorry about the phone,” I say.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“Why, Sarah? Why didn’t you?”
“I kept thinking he’d stop if I didn’t answer, and he wasn’t saying anything that I thought you needed to know.” First reason stupid, second reason worse. The third has to be dug from the raw, core truth. “He’s my brother, and he was never this nice to me.”
Dario nods and looks away as if he can’t deal with how pathetic I am. It’s unbearable.
“I have value.” I go toward him instead of running away.
“No.” His denial is such a blow I feels my knees go weak under me, but he catches me by the waist. “You don’t have value.” He holds me when I try to wrestle away. “A value is a number. It’s for a comparison to other numbers. Other things. A diamond has value. A piece of real estate. A bank account has value. Not you. You don’t have some value I can measure. You’re priceless.”
All my strength goes into my arms as they snake around him and squeeze him so close, I can’t dream of a world outside his love. His jacket is too thin to hide the warmth and shape of his body, and his bones and muscles cannot mask the beating of his heart.
“I’m so sorry, Dario.”
“You just forced me to do what has to be done anyway. People… men will die. I might be one of them. But my brother’s been sitting in the middle of it. If I turn tail and run, what does that make me?”
“A coward.”
He’s already started a response, but he stops, open-mouthed, before a sound comes out.
I take a deep breath, because of every stupid thing I’ve done, this is the most stupid.
“Let me go talk to Massimo. In person.”
“Are you fucked in the head?”
“I can talk sense into him.” My sense won’t be sense the way Dario sees it. I have another few seconds to dump everything in my head. “We speak the same language. I know what’s important to him. He might have objected to what happened to Dafne. He might not have believed the message—the dress—and if I just—”
“No.”
“Or why can’t I call him and talk to him? He might be an ally for us—”
“There is no us!”
He pushes me back against a tree, changing his angle to the house. With the light on one side of his face, I can see the fire in his eyes. It’s not rage. Not lust. It’s something I’ve never seen before.
“Let me help you,” I say.
“No.” He releases me and walks back to the house.
I chase him with those big, stupid shoes, tripping on the edge of the deck, hands out to break my fall. He starts to come back outside to help me up, but I launch myself at him, feet free, arms extended, pushing him back into the kitchen. We both land in a crouch, me leaning forward, Dario on his back foot, surprised… but not for long.
I get a hand under the seat of a chair and hurl it at him. He throws up his arms and catches it, but I’ve already thrown a vase.
“Why not?” The vase catches a chair leg and thuds to the floor. “Because I’m weak?” He uses the chair for a shield against the flying teakettle. “Because I’m stupid?” The flour canister sprays white powder. “Because I’m incompetent?” The salt and pepper shakers separate midair. One is deflected with the chair. The other hits his shoulder. “Because you’re better off without me?” I’m going to throw every last damn thing this stupid kitchen hasn’t hidden behind an invisible cabinet door.
“Stop!” He tosses the chair aside and grabs my arms before I fling the cast-iron pan at his head.
“Tell me why!”
“Because I’m scared!” The expression I couldn’t define—the one that was neither rage nor lust—it’s all over his face, clear as day, and it’s terror. It doesn’t melt away with the admission that it exists but intensifies into something red hot and feral. “You scare the fuck out of me. Anything that happens to you from now on—for the rest of your life—it’s my fault. If I leave you here. Send you away. If your fucking plane crashes on the way to the island, it’s my fault, because you would have been sitting home doing fucking needlepoint if I hadn’t taken you.”
“I’m your wife. Your problems are my problems.”
He lets me go and puts his hands in his pockets. “Shit.” He takes a little blue box from his pocket and stares at it as if every accusation ever made against him—the true and untrue—is inside it. “Shit!”
He opens the box. I expect all of life’s miseries to fly out like crows, followed by hope.
“Look! Do you see this? I didn’t even ask you to marry me. I left you here without… shit!” His face crumples as he holds out one hand, palm up, to indicate some obvious point the diamond ring makes, even if it’s not obvious to me. “I can’t even do this. I ran off like a fucking…”
Without finishing, he falls onto a chair, postured like a dishrag with the box dangling from his fingertips. He runs his fingers through his hair, looking at the floor as if he wants to drill two holes into it.
I can’t bear to see him like this. He wasn’t built to coexist with fear. He’s supposed to channel it into rage, and actions, and plans.
I kneel at his feet, looking up at his reddened face.
“You’re Dario Lucari. You’re my husband. You are not scared. I’m not sitting at home embroidering because you taught me more.”
“I taught you nothing. You’re overconfident. You’re on a suicide mission. I’m more fucking terrified now than I was when I made you marry me.”
“You didn’t make me fall in love with you.”
“Love doesn’t matter. It’s meaningless. Love’s not going to save us.”
He knows a lot more about the world than I do. He knows society. How people move and think. He knows about tools and technology. But he doesn’t know anything about love, and he knows less about what’s going to save me.
“Make me stop loving you then.” I stand before him, and he looks up at me. Every dancing fire in his eyes flickers with life—a kaleidoscope of conflicting passions. “If it doesn’t mean anything, make my love go away. You can’t. Outside your family, you’ve never been loved past reason. Past hurt and harm. You were always alone, and now you’re not, because I love you, and I’m going to fight for it. For us. I’m going to fight for you as hard as you fought for me.”
One eye narrows. A newly ignited fire glints where despair had taken hold.
“That’s not your job.”
I take the box from him and pull the ring out of its slit.
“Saving you is my job.” I slide off the snowflake ring and put it on the other hand.
I’m about to replace it with the new ring, but he stands and takes it for me.
“My job,” he says, sliding the diamond ring past the scar and deep against the base of my finger. “Is to keep you safe from the world, and me.”
“You’d never harm me.”