I hated that he paid enough attention to see that.
The waiter shows up with our food and clears our salads. When Alessandro assures him we don’t need anything else, he leaves.
“There are some things I missed last time I was here,” he says, lowering his eyes to his plate and cutting a wedge off his quiche with the side of his fork. “We could start in the nineteenth-century European section?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say as he chews, ’cause it’s all Greek to me. “You’re going to tell me what’s what, right? Because I’m pretty clueless about this stuff.”
He holds up a finger, and after he swallows, he says, “I’ll tell you as much as I know, but everything’s pretty well labeled.”
“If you say so.” I’m nervous. I’m not sure why, but I don’t want to seem like a total idiot in front of him.
“So, tell me about your sister,” he says and my stomach lurches.
“What about her?”
There’s an edge to my voice, and hearing it, his gaze lifts from his plate and questions me.
“She’s great,” I say, preempting his next question, which would be some version of “What’s wrong?” “She’s married to a great guy and they have two great kids and they’re great.”
“Boys or girls?”
“Boys.”
“And you’re their favorite aunt, I’m sure,” he says with half an amused smile.
Despite the knot in my stomach, I can’t help smiling back. “Something like that.”
“Do you enjoy children?”
“What do you mean?”
He lowers his fork to his plate. “I mean, are you a kid person? Do you want children of your own?”
“Hell, no!” I say, but then amend, “I mean, Henri and Max are fun, and I like hanging out with them, but I don’t want any of my own.”
He tips his head at me. “Why not?”
I shrug. “Some people just aren’t cut out to be parents, you know?”
He nods. “I struggle with that. I’m not convinced I’d make a good father, but I can’t deny the part of me that desperately wants a family—children of my own. Lots of them.”
I look down at my plate and twirl my pasta. “You need to find someone who feels the same way for that.”
“This is true.” He picks up his fork and his eyes study my face as he takes another bite. “Were you were happy living with your sister and her family?”
I relax a little. “Yeah. I was really happy there.”
“How long did you live with them?”
“I moved out about three years ago, when I was nineteen.”
“Did you go to college?”
What is this, twenty questions? “No,” I say a little defensively.
His gaze finds mine again. “Why not?”
“Because . . . I don’t know. I didn’t want to go right out of high school. I took a couple of community-college classes to keep Mallory off my back, but I really just wanted to act. And then American Idol happened and I started getting auditions and moved into the city and . . . I just never wanted to go.”
He holds my gaze. “No judgment, Hilary. I’m just curious.”
I look down as I twirl my pasta on my fork.
When we’re done and Alessandro pays, he leads me up to the second floor. There’s a long gallery with paintings on the walls and statues on pedestals. At each one, we stop and read the plaque that tells us what it is. Occasionally, he tells me things that aren’t on the plaque—like how the artist died, or who he trained with. He seems even more relaxed here than he did over lunch, and I realize, what walking in the rain does for me, art does for him.
About halfway down, we come to a painting that looks different from the others. It’s of a woman in a gold-yellow dress with black curly hair, sitting there staring off the canvas at us. She’s pretty in a sort of unique way and she looks like she wouldn’t take crap from anyone.
“Henri Regnault’s Salomé,” Alessandro says. “It’s one of the signature pieces of the Romantic movement.”
“I like it. She looks like she has her shit together.” My eyes flick to the plaque next to the painting and I run a finger under the artist’s name. “Henri . . . It’s spelled the same as my nephew. They named him after Jeff’s dad.”
“It’s the traditional French spelling, pronounced ehn-reh.”
“That sounded very French.”
“Oui, mademoiselle,” he says with a smile.
“That sounded very French too.”
“I lived in France after I left here,” he says, and that’s when I realize I don’t even know where Corsica is.
“So you speak French?”
“I do.”
“But I remember you had an accent before.” And, wow. I only just remembered that as I said it. But he did, just a little. It was the way certain words rolled off his tongue.
“I may have,” he says with a little bit of a cringe, like it embarrasses him. “Italian was my first language. My father was in the military and we lived in Italy until I was six. He spoke Italian to us in the home even after we came back to New York.”
“So you speak French and Italian. What else?”
He smiles. “English.”
I roll my eyes at him. “I mean what else?”
His smile turns to more of a smirk and he lifts his eyebrows at me. “That’s not enough?”
I shrug. “I guess. Say something in Italian.”
“Come sei bella,” he says, his smile softening.
“What did you say?”
“You are beautiful.”
I just stare at him for way too long before turning back to Salomé. “Why did you stop drawing?”
I hear him blow out a sigh, but I don’t turn away from the painting. “Things changed. I just didn’t feel . . . inspired. I lost my love of it, I suppose.”
“That’s too bad. You were good.” He saw things that others missed. He saw everything. And then he managed to put it on paper in a way that made it more real than it had been in the moment. Or, at least it felt that way.
The memory that flashes in my head makes me smile.
“What?” Alessandro asks, giving me a curious look.
“Do you remember that day in the park? It was right before you . . .” left, but I can’t make myself say it. “You were drawing me and I grabbed your sketch pad and ran away, and I ran into that totally lame mime guy near the fountain, who kept doing—”
“—trapped in a box,” he finishes for me with a smile and a small shake of his head.
“Yeah. And he got pissed and started cussing me out and then all those little orange-and-black butterflies came, and like, swarmed us.”
“We never did figure out what kind of butterflies those were,” he muses with distant eyes, still smiling.
“It was pretty cool, though. I’d never seen more than one or two butterflies in the park before that.” I remember Alessandro pulling me against him and laughing as they fluttered all around us. And I remember feeling free in a way I never had before, like I was one of them, fluttering above the ground, light as air. I could go anywhere. Be anything. The feeling made me dizzy. Alessandro made me dizzy. I think that’s the second I knew I loved him, because in anybody else’s arms, I felt trapped, but in his, I felt free.
We spend the next two hours in the European painting galleries, looking at super old paintings that seem to be mostly Italian and French, and Alessandro answers all my questions. He gets pretty excited when I ask something, his hands working as he answers, so without even meaning to, I find myself asking a lot. I love watching those hands. But it’s more than that. It’s like his enthusiasm is contagious, because I’m surprisingly non-bored.