Chapter 108 Cake and Everyone Who Mattered

Chapter 108 Cake and Everyone Who Mattered
Alexandria's POV.

The reception spilled out across the garden as the sun started its slow descent, string lights my mother had spent two days hanging now glowing soft against the deepening blue overhead, and somewhere a small speaker played music low enough that conversation never had to compete with it.

I had changed into something easier to move in, a simpler dress my mother had helped me into while laughing about how she had cried through every single one of my hair pins coming undone, and found Salvatore waiting at the bottom of the stairs exactly where he said he would be.

"Mrs. Greco," he said, offering his arm with mock formality.

"Don't," I said, taking it anyway. "I'm still adjusting to the name."

"You have decades to adjust," he said. "I'm not in a hurry."

We walked out together into the noise and warmth of it, the particular chaos of a celebration that had somehow assembled itself out of people who two years ago had every reason to hate each other and now could not stop finding excuses to be in the same room.

Dominic had abandoned the suit jacket entirely and was sitting at a table near the back with Daniela asleep against his shoulder, one hand resting protectively against her back while he scrolled something on his phone with the other, looking for all the world like a man who had never once considered himself capable of this kind of stillness.

"She wore herself out demanding cake three times before it was actually served," he said when I came over. "I told her twice was excessive. She did not listen to either warning."

"She never does," I said, smoothing a hand over her hair. "Thank you for holding her."

"She fell asleep on me," he said. "I did not have much say in the matter."

I left them there and found my mother near the food table, deep in conversation with Mrs. Greco about something that involved a great deal of hand gestures and what sounded like competing opinions on the correct way to season jollof rice, both women clearly enjoying the argument far more than either would admit.

"Your mother says I have been adding too much curry," Mrs. Greco told me as I approached, clearly delighted by the disagreement.

"She's right," I said. "You have."

"Traitor," Mrs. Greco said, but she was smiling when she said it.

I found Kara on the small patch of grass that had become an impromptu dance floor, swaying with Theo on her hip while he tried determinedly to grab at the string lights overhead, his small face scrunched in concentration.

"He thinks he can reach them," she said. "I've told him three times. He remains unconvinced."

"He's stubborn," I said. "Wonder where he gets that."

"Don't," she said, laughing. "I've had enough of that joke from Salvatore already today."

I watched her for a moment, swaying easily in the soft light, and thought about the woman who had once stood across a kitchen counter from me with fury behind her eyes and a deadline in her voice, and felt something settle fully into place that had been slowly settling for two years.

"Dance with me," I said, holding out my hands.

She looked surprised for a moment, then handed Theo off to his grandmother, who had appeared at exactly the right moment the way she always seemed to now, and took my hands.

We swayed together, not quite dancing properly, both of us a little unsure of the rhythm but neither of us caring, and I thought about how impossible this exact moment would have seemed to either of us two years ago.

"Thank you," I said quietly. "For today. For all of it."

"You don't need to thank me," she said. "I think we built this together, in the end. All of us."

"I know," I said. "I'm thanking you anyway."

She squeezed my hands once and let the moment sit there, warm and uncomplicated, exactly as it needed to be.

Salvatore found me as the music shifted into something slower, and Kara stepped back gracefully to let him take her place, going to collect Theo from his grandmother with the particular easy efficiency of a woman who had finally found her footing in every part of this complicated, beautiful family.

"Mrs. Greco," Salvatore said again, pulling me close.

"You're going to keep doing that all night."

"I plan to," he said. "I've waited a long time to say it properly."

I rested my head against his chest and looked out at the garden, at Dominic still holding a sleeping Daniela like something precious he had not expected to be trusted with, at my mother laughing with Mrs. Greco over a disputed pot of jollof rice, at Kara swinging Theo gently while he reached for lights he would never quite catch, at the string lights glowing soft overhead and the last color draining slowly out of the sky.

"My father would have loved this," I said.

"I think he built it," Salvatore said quietly. "Long before either of us understood what we were standing inside. Everything that happened, all of it, somehow led exactly here."

I thought about the storage unit, the boxes, the letter folded twice in my father's careful handwriting. Trust your mother and trust yourself.

I had done both, and the road that trust had carved had been longer and harder than I ever could have predicted, but it had delivered me here, into this garden, into this family, into arms that had finally stopped managing everything and simply learned how to hold what mattered.

"He would have loved you too," I said. "Eventually. After he gave you a very hard time about it first."

"I would have earned every bit of it," Salvatore said.

The music continued soft around us, and somewhere behind me I heard Daniela stir against Dominic's shoulder and ask, half asleep, if there was still cake, and heard my mother's laugh rise warm over the answer, and felt, standing there in Salvatore's arms with the whole unlikely shape of this family scattered happy across the garden, that there was nothing left I needed to survive.

There was only this.

Full, complicated, hard won, and entirely, finally, ours.