Chapter 103 His Mother

Chapter 103 His Mother
Alexandria's POV.

I had not stopped looking at my hand since the night before.

It was a small, foolish thing to keep doing, glancing down at the ring every few minutes like it might have disappeared since the last time I checked, but I could not help it. The diamond caught the morning light differently depending on how I turned my wrist, and every time it did something in my chest lifted in a way I had stopped expecting to feel about anything connected to Salvatore.

I was still sitting with that feeling, turning my hand slowly under the kitchen light, when my mother came in from the hallway with her face arranged into something careful.

"Salvatore just called," she said. "His mother is coming. Today."

I set my cup down. "Today."

"In about two hours."

I looked at my hand again, at the ring, and felt the lift in my chest shift into something closer to nerves.

Salvatore had told me about his mother only in fragments over the year. She lived mostly abroad, visited rarely, and had very particular opinions about everything from how a household should be run to what a woman owed a family she married into. I understood enough from the way he spoke about her, careful and slightly guarded even now, that this was not a woman who arrived anywhere without already having decided what she thought.

She was about to arrive in my mother's house and meet the woman wearing her son's ring while he was still married to someone else.

"I need to call him," I said.

"You need to get dressed," my mother said. "Properly. And feed that child before anyone else does it for you, because once his mother is in this house you will not get a quiet moment to do it yourself."

I went upstairs.

Daniela was awake in her crib, already pulling herself up against the rail the way she had started doing in the last month, delighted with her own new ability to stand and demand attention from a height. I picked her up and she immediately reached for my hand, for the ring specifically, small fingers closing around the band with the particular fascination she had for anything shiny.

"That's mine," I told her. "You can have one of your own someday."

She babbled something that was not yet language and pulled at my finger anyway.

I fed her and dressed her and dressed myself in something simple and deliberate, not trying too hard and not trying too little, the particular balance I had learned to strike over a year of being a woman whose position in this extended family required careful calibration even on ordinary days.

This was not an ordinary day.

Salvatore arrived first, alone, looking like a man bracing for something. He came into the kitchen and found me there with Daniela on my hip and stopped for a moment just looking at us before he crossed the room.

"You didn't tell me she was coming this soon," I said.

"I didn't know," he said. "She called from the airport. She does this. Arrives and announces rather than asks." He reached for Daniela and she went to him easily, the way she always did, and he held her against his chest and looked at me over her head. "I should have warned you properly. I'm sorry."

"What does she know," I said. "About all of this."

He was quiet for a moment.

"She knows about Daniela," he said. "She does not know about the ring yet."

I looked at my hand.

"Should I take it off," I said.

"No." His voice came out firm, immediate, with no hesitation in it at all. "Absolutely not. Whatever she thinks about any of this, you are not going to hide what you are to me because she has not adjusted to it yet."

I held his gaze.

"She's going to have opinions," I said.

"She always does," he said. "That has never once stopped me from doing what I decided was right."

The car arrived thirty minutes later.

I watched from the window as the driver opened the door and a woman stepped out, tall, elegantly dressed in the particular understated way that signaled money without needing to announce it loudly, her posture so straight it looked almost rehearsed. She looked at the house for a moment before she walked toward it, the same unhurried assessment I had seen Salvatore do a hundred times, and I understood immediately where he had learned it.

My mother opened the door before she could knock.

"Mrs. Greco," my mother said warmly. "Welcome. Please, come in."

She stepped inside and her eyes moved through the hallway with the same careful cataloguing I had watched her son do in my mother's kitchen all those months ago. Then her eyes landed on me, standing with Daniela on my hip, and she stopped.

"So," she said. "This is her."

"Mama," Salvatore said.

"I am simply confirming," she said, not unkindly, just directly, the particular bluntness of a woman who had decided a long time ago that softening her observations served no one.

She crossed the room and stood in front of me and looked at Daniela first, properly, the way a grandmother looks at a grandchild she has only seen in photographs.

Daniela looked back at her with open curiosity and reached out one hand.

Something in the older woman's face moved.

She reached out and let Daniela's fingers close around hers, the same small claiming gesture I had watched her do with Salvatore in the hospital room, with Kara on the porch, with anyone who offered themselves to be held onto.

"She has your father's eyes," Mrs. Greco said quietly. Not to me. To Salvatore.

"I know," he said.

She looked up then, and her eyes moved down to my hand, to the ring catching the light exactly the way it had been catching it all morning, and her expression shifted into something I could not immediately read.

"You proposed," she said. Still to Salvatore. Still not quite looking at me.

"Yes," he said.

"And your wife."

"Kara knows," Salvatore said evenly. "We have spoken about it honestly. This is not something happening behind her back."

Mrs. Greco was quiet for a long moment. She looked at me directly for the first time since she had walked in, the particular assessing gaze of a woman deciding what kind of person was standing in front of her.

"You are not what I expected," she said finally.

"What did you expect," I said.

"Someone smaller," she said. "Someone who would let this family decide who she was allowed to become." She looked at the ring again. "You do not look like a woman who lets anyone decide that for her."

"I'm not," I said.

Something that might have been the beginning of respect moved across her face.

"Good," she said. "Because my son has never for once in his life chosen the easy thing, and I would not trust a woman who made it easy for him now."

She handed Daniela back to me carefully, the particular gentleness of someone unused to holding babies but determined to do it right anyway.

"We have a great deal to discuss," she said, looking between Salvatore and me. "Properly. Sit down, both of you. I did not fly across an ocean to stand in a hallway."

I looked at Salvatore.

He looked back, something steady passing between us, and I understood that whatever came next in this conversation, we were going to face it the way we had faced everything else.

Together.

We sat down.