Page 115 of My Dark Ever After

She pouted, but her eyes sparkled in the low light inside the car.

“Besides, you do not have to wait long,” I said as I pulled up to the front of the Uffizi, where a valet was waiting for us.

If Guinevere was disappointed we were going to the famous gallery when she had already visited, she did not say a word as I helped her from the car and handed the keys to the valet, the same young man I had met outside Guinevere’s apartment in the summer. He grinned atme as he took the keys, but a single cool glare reeled in his enthusiasm for driving my car.

“I recognize him,” Guinevere murmured as we made our way inside the museum.

“He was one of the thugs outside your shoddy apartment beside Fortezza da Basso.”

“That’s a weird coincidence,” she said, peering up at me because she knew it was not just that.

“He had the decency to look out for you while you lived there and keep the general riffraff from disturbing you, so I hired him for a few odd jobs.” I shrugged.

“Sweet,” she reminded me, as she had done so many times since we had met. “You are unbearably sweet, Raffa Romano, and there is no hiding it from me.”

“I think your definition needs recalibrating if you think hiring a young thug to work for my criminal outfit is worthy of an altruism award.”

She laughed, the sound echoing off the marble floors and pillared walkway as we made our way down the silent corridor toward the gallery I had selected for the night.

“Where is everyone?” she asked.

“It is past closing time,” I told her as we stopped at the entrance to the temporary exhibition space. “And this special exhibition is only for you.”

“What?” she gasped as I pushed the doors open to the hall.

The interior was decorated sublimely, given the short amount of time the curator, Amir Saleh, had had to bring everything together for me.

In the center of the room sat a small table draped in white linen and laid with fine silver and china, a bottle of prosecco and a bottle of sparkling juice sitting in a gold bucket beside the chairs. The floor was festooned with red petals, not from roses but from poppies, the same flowers I had imagined Guinevere twirling in the first time she’d tried on a red dress for me.

But it was the art in the room that stole the show.

Amir had brought in part of the Dante exhibit they had shown at the Ashmolean in Oxford a few years ago thanks to my connections there. Auguste Rodin’s sculptureThe Kissdominated one corner, on loan from Paris, and art from Salvador Dalí, William Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti flanked the walls.

Immediately before the table sat the most famous piece of art in the entire museum, though. Sandro Botticelli’sThe Birth of Venus, his goddess bearing a remarkable resemblance to his great love, Simonetta.

Next to that, Alessandro Allori’sThe Abduction of Proserpine.

Pavarotti’s music played softly in the background as Guinevere clapped her hand to her chest as if to contain her wildly beating heart and swept around the room, staring at each piece.

I waited inside the doors, hands clasped behind my back, as I watched her look of unadulterated shock and wonder.

Finally, she stopped before the painting of Venus and turned to me with her mouth open in a soft O.

“This,” she started, and then swallowed hard before trying again with an ineloquent wave of her hand. “This is a love letter written in art. You ... you found all the stories we’ve likened our love to.”

“I did,” I agreed. “Though there is a mosaic in Ravenna of Theodora and Justinian that is adhered to the wall of a church, so I will just have to plan a trip there for you to see it.”

“They’re ... God, Raffa. They’re so beautiful,” she whispered through the thickness of emotion in her throat.

Her eyes sparkled with unshed tears.

I stepped toward her and gathered her beautiful heart-shaped face in my hands so she could see the sincerity in my eyes when I said, “None of them come close to the beauty you bring to my life. Not one of these stories is as perfect to me as ours.”

Her hands came up to clasp my wrists, holding me to her. “Even though I left you?”

I rubbed my thumb against the end of her pouting mouth to erase the frown.

“I am glad you left,” I said. “It taught us both lessons we needed to learn.”