Page 98 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

CHAPTER TEN

Amelia felt like she was walking on very thin ice. She was shocked he’d asked her to stay—okay, demanded her to stay—and be a part of this.

If she thought he was doing it because she would offer comfort, she would warmly agree and jump right in, but he was too big on punishing himself. He hadn’t flipped any switches that quickly. Her presence felt more like…an exercise in masochism? Making her watch his pain.

She watched him stare at the box. She didn’t think he realized he was breathing a little heavily. That he was looking at the box like it might come to life and bite.

So maybe it wasn’t punishment. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but he seemed so…lost. He hadn’t known what to say to Mrs. Moretti. He hadn’t known what to say to her .

So now he was pretending to know what to do by insisting this be just business. Just Christmas-ball prep. She could tell him she saw right through him. Gamble that her intuition was correct.

She decided against it, though. There was no reason to point it out to him. He’d just double down on pretending it was business and meant nothing.

So she walked over to stand next to him and said nothing as he pulled the box top off with perhaps more force than necessary. He reached in with no finesse and jerked out a large, overstuffed album that must have been on top. His mouth twisted in something like disgust.

“Do you recognize it?” she asked him gently.

“No,” he said flatly.

“Then let’s sit.” She nudged him toward the chair he’d pulled up to her desk earlier, then pulled hers around to this side. He put the book down on the desk in front of them and flipped open the cover without sitting down.

She wanted to admonish him to be more careful, as they didn’t know what they were dealing with or how old and delicate what was inside would be, but she bit her tongue.

The first page was a snapshot of two young people. It took Amelia a few moments to place them. “Your parents.” They were in casual clothes in front of a fancy-looking chalet.

“Yes.” He sounded winded, and he finally lowered himself into his chair like his legs couldn’t hold him up anymore. Amelia took a seat as well, moving her gaze from the picture to his face.

“They met skiing. Their fathers had gone to university together, lost touch, then happened upon each other when my parents were teenagers at this chalet.” He delivered this information as if by rote, pointing at the building behind the young, smiling couple.

Amelia was a bit surprised he knew how his parents had met, but she didn’t press the matter. Not when he was busy already turning the page.

There were more snapshots. Mr. and Mrs. Folliero as young adults in various scenes and poses. “I do not know what this has to do with any ball,” he muttered, but he did not close the book or move away.

Amelia leaned forward and pointed to a snapshot in the bottom corner.

“Look. That is Dolcina. At Christmas.” She could see a nativity in the background, clearly in the nearby village, based on the surroundings.

“And look.” She pointed at Mrs. Folliero’s left hand carefully and, Amelia thought, purposefully displayed on Mr. Folliero’s shoulder, so that even in this casual snapshot, the huge diamond was the focal point. “They got engaged.”

Diego grunted and turned the page without comment on that. There were more formal pictures here. Of the wedding.

“A Christmas wedding.” Amelia smiled in spite of herself. “They did love Christmas, didn’t they?”

“Yes. It was a Folliero tradition.” He turned the page, clearly not as interested in the beautiful wedding dress or intricate gold-and-green cake as Amelia was.

On this page, there was a family photo. It did not look as if it had been taken by a professional photographer like the other pictures that were displayed around the house, hung by the Follieros before their deaths.

This picture was more of a snapshot. Mr. and Mrs. Folliero, young and smiling, with a very large baby on Mrs. Folliero’s lap.

Since this baby was the only child in the picture, and he was dressed in blue, Amelia had to assume it was Diego. She laughed, couldn’t help the reaction. “Look at that pudgy face.”

He scowled at her, but it wasn’t anger in his eyes. There was some amusement, even as he only grunted and turned the page away from himself as a small, pudgy baby.

There were more shots of Mr. and Mrs. Folliero together than there were family photos that included Diego or Aurora, but these photos were all more casual shots than anything professional or posed, as if they hadn’t been too, too worried about how they looked.

Amelia glanced at Diego. He was frowning at a page of pictures in which his parents had clearly taken some sort of trip.

Sunny blue skies and tranquil blue waters, while the happy couple smiled for the camera in every frame.

There were no children to be seen, so Amelia assumed it was a trip they’d taken without Diego or Aurora.

Maybe an anniversary trip. Amelia knew pictures could be deceiving, showing only the happiest moments of a person’s life, but she’d also known the Follieros. For all their faults, they had truly seemed to care for one another.

“They look happy, do they not?” he said, still frowning down at them, as if their happiness was some kind of puzzle to figure out.

“They do,” Amelia agreed. “They were happy, I think.” She didn’t know that it was comfort, but she did think it was true.

“It was Aurora and I who were not.”

She could not argue that. She’d known Aurora much more closely than Diego, and she had gotten mostly frustration and bitterness from the younger Folliero. She had never imagined Diego was much different, especially since he had not been around often once Amelia had arrived.

“I always thought…” She thought better of her thoughts , when he whipped his gaze to hers, stark and angry, a sudden change from the stunned sort of detachment he’d been sporting.

She swallowed, then managed a wobbly smile. “Well, this hasn’t quite given us a look into the Christmas-ball past, has it?”

“No, tell me. Tell me what you always thought.” He said it like an order, and Amelia felt compelled to obey it like one.

Still, she paused, considering her words and what they might mean to him. In the end, she thought…understanding was the thing he was missing. It was the thing that kept him stuck, seeking punishment over healing.

He did not know how to grieve or heal or seek to understand, so she had to offer it to him, so that he might learn.

“Your parents loved each other, and they knew what to do with that,” Amelia said carefully, trying to put the way her father had explained things in his journals into her own words, her own observations of the Follieros.

“They loved the both of you, but they did not know what to do with…children. They only knew how to spoil or neglect or demand exactly what they wanted from you. They did not know how to…look at you as people. And because you were children, and your own individual people, you did not know how to tell them. Or show them what you needed.”

His eyes narrowed. “That’s very astute.”

“It was more my father’s feeling than my own,” she admitted. “But I did see evidence of it. Particularly with Aurora. She was so determined to be the opposite of what they wanted, and they simply…let her drift away. I suppose they did the same with you. I just wasn’t there for it.”

Diego was silent for some time, just staring at her. She didn’t know what else to do but sit there and wait for him to break the silence or look away or something .

When he finally spoke, he ignored the content of her words. “Your father discussed my parents’ inability to be parents with you?”

“No, no. Not exactly, no. After his death, I found…his collection of journals. Over the past two years, I’ve been reading through them.

It helps me feel like…he’s still here, or that I’m getting to know him better, or something.

Just a few entries a day so I can spread it out.

So I’m still learning new things about him even though he isn’t here. ”

She didn’t know why she’d felt the need to confess all that. The details of the how and why. She could have left it at she’d read it in his journals, but instead she’d offered a piece of her heart, her grief.

How she kept holding on to her father, even though he wasn’t here. And hearing it out loud sounded…wrong, somehow. Like she, too, was holding on to an illusion that didn’t really serve her. Like he had been right when he’d accused her of having no life outside of this .

She found the strength to look up at Diego then. His gaze on hers was one of pain and confusion, matching what she was feeling right now.

The past hurt, the future confused, but the present was just a series of days to get through, and wasn’t that depressing? Why was her present so depressing? And what would her future ever be if she stayed stuck right here?

His gaze was back on the book as he turned more pages. “I’m sure there will be pictures of the ball if we keep looking,” he said, sounding uninterested and in control.

While her heart was soft and bruised in her chest, uncertainty shaking all her foundations.

Diego finally moved past his parents as a happy, wealthy couple who loved pictures of themselves—far more pictures of the two of them than their children—and found a few pages that depicted some of the Christmas balls in his early childhood.

Amelia took careful notes about the decor, what she could make out of the pictures. Sometimes she talked about a plan that would be adjusted or something she’d already had just right.

She didn’t mention her father again.

He didn’t mind pushing daggers into his own pain and grief and guilt, but seeing it reflected in her changeable eyes as a deep, abiding sadness , that held nothing bitter in it…

He was the reason Bartolo Baresi was dead. And his daughter sat next to Diego now, trying to accomplish…something by bringing him back here.