Page 62 of The Best Wild Idea (Off-Limits #3)

Jules

Five years later

Nonna Lisi pushes Emmy’s tiny hands into the puff of dough that’s nearly as big as she is.

The two of them scrunch their faces at each other, just a few inches apart, then burst into laughter at the very same time.

Emmy turns to me and holds her hands up, completely covered in a sticky mess of flour and egg.

Her eyes glow up at Nonna Lisi when I snap a photo of them.

The view of the sea glitters out the open window behind her.

They continue working the dough together, Nonna Lisi tutting over the way Emmy’s already quite the natural when I realize that Emmy’s melodic giggle has become my very favorite sound in the whole world, tied only with her twin brother’s giggle, too. And their dad’s.

I turn to watch Si, who’s on the other side of the worn, wooden counter, doing the same thing with our sweet little boy, Emmy’s twin, Grant.

The two have flour almost exclusively covering their chests with an additional swipe of dough on Si’s cheek from Grant’s chubby finger.

Si must feel me watching because he turns to look at me and mouths, “I love you” as our eyes meet across the sunbathed kitchen.

I jump when Nonna Lisi’s voice echoes across the little stone kitchen, startling me out of the moment.

“I knew it!” she cries out, her curled, doughy finger pointed up toward the sky, grinning so wide that her eyes look like tiny blue crescents of light. She turns to our daughter and whispers, “I knew your mamma and papá were in love. Even before they did.”

Emmy points to me, repeating her new favorite word, “Mamma!”

I laugh. “You were right, Nonna,” I tell her, even though she already knows she was right. We tell her every time we come back for a visit. “We just hadn’t admitted it to ourselves that night. Not for another twenty minutes or so at least,” I add, smiling at Si.

“I know. You were too busy up here,” she says, tapping her head, “when you should have been busy in here.” She moves her finger to tap her heart.

Si chuckles, just as little Grant blows a puff of flour across the counter at his shirt, which is already covered in a thick layer. Silas closes his eyes when the cloud of flour hits his face, and we all laugh.

We’ve tried coming back to visit almost every year since moving to Milan a few summers ago, but it’s been harder since the twins were born a little over a year ago.

This is her first time meeting the kids, and they both took to her immediately, just like Silas and I knew they would.

It’s impossible not to. She immediately approved of our son’s name, adding, “I loved him the moment I saw him, too.”

I haven’t stepped foot in this kitchen since before I found out I was pregnant and it’s taking me back to the night Silas and I first arrived in Italy, ending our evening with a decision that would completely change the course of our lives.

I smile to myself, thinking back on the memory which now seems like something out of a dream.

It wasn’t until I’d boarded the plane to Paris, alone and angry the next morning, that I’d pulled out the letter from Grant I’d gotten at the hotel the night before.

I don’t know if I was looking for validation that leaving Silas was the right thing to do, when I had, in fact, found the exact opposite in Grant’s words as I began to read.

Now, years later, here I am. I’m watching what he wanted for me — for us — playing out in front of me.

I replay the words I’ve read so many times that I’ve practically memorized them at this point.

Although Grant’s letters have been tucked in a box and hidden away in our closet for a few years now, I can almost recite every one of them from memory.

His letter from Italy begins playing softly through my mind:

Jules,

My love, you’re never going to believe what you’re doing next.

Alright, I’ll tell you . . .

I’m giving you a break from crash courses in adrenaline by sending you to do something a little more your speed.

You and Si (if you haven’t parted ways and have managed to make it this far together) are heading to a pasta-making lesson in a tiny little stone house.

I have no idea how Monica found this woman, but you’re going to love her.

Nonna Lisi is her name, and she insisted that she have a call with me before she’d agree to the lesson since she only does a few of these each year for people somehow connected to her.

So, while you were out of the hospital room earlier today, this sweet woman put me on Facetime, right there in her perfect, stone-wall kitchen surrounded in ancient bowls with the coastline shimmering out these huge stone windows behind her.

She’s perfect, Jules. She’s exactly the type of person you might always dream of making pasta with while in Italy.

And the second her face lit up my screen, I knew that she was exactly what you’d need in your life right about now.

Why pasta making in Italy, other than it just being utterly awesome and something you mentioned wanting to try?

Because Italy is all about a good meal surrounded by family and friends, Jules, and finding the heart of your life in something that lives outside of yourself.

When I saw the warmth this woman and her tiny kitchen were exuding, even through a phone screen, I knew I had to send you there.

You’ve always wanted to have a family. It’s one of the things we dreamed about together, and if I’m being honest, it’s one of the things I already miss the most without ever having gotten the opportunity to experience it.

Leaving the world without a scrap of evidence that I was ever in it may be in the cards for me, but it doesn’t have to happen for you, too.

When you’re standing in the heart of her home, hopefully with a mess of dough in front of you, I want you to remember something: You deserve to feel love.

Whether your future includes kids or not, or maybe it’s a hand-selected chosen family made of the people you’d give the world for because, when you’re with them, you feel so damn loved and at ease that you always leave their company feeling perfectly whole again.

However you get there, just get there. Fill your life with people and places as warm and loving as the home you’ll be standing in.

And please go easy on Si while you’re there.

He needs the exact same thing you do. You might not know this yet, or maybe he told you while you two were sailing on Vivi in Spain, but I went to visit him there after his dad passed.

It was while you were on that wedding prep weekend with your friends and I flew to see him with the sole purpose of bringing him home.

You and I were about to close on our townhouse in Boston to move into together, while he buried his dad and had nothing left to ground him.

I boarded the boat he didn’t know his dad owned or had named after his mother, and I can see why he didn’t want to come home. The whole experience of sailing out there was beautiful. All of it. The glowing blue water, the sails billowing, the raw edge of slicing through the sea like butter.

I couldn’t believe he had all that and more at his fingertips.

I told him he was crazy for risking his future like that, threatening to not come home.

But he’d looked right at me and said, “I’d give it all back for a chance to have the shit that matters more.

Family that loves you. A future that means something to somebody other than yourself.

Someone waiting up for you at the end of the day. ”

His words hit me square in the gut. It didn’t matter that he could have probably bought the whole coastline of properties in Cádiz that day if he wanted without a second thought. What he really wanted was the one thing his money could never buy. A family. Love. In his words, the shit that matters.

I want to give you both this experience at Nonna Lisi’s house.

You, to remind you of what you have right in front of you, and Si, to remind him that what he’s always wanted is right there.

Remember that you’re exactly what you both need right now: two people that have always felt like home to each other.

Don’t let a few dumb mistakes in the past make it impossible to feel that way again.

Even if it’s only for one night spent around a glowing kitchen in an ancient house that somehow feels like you’ve been there before.

Just take him with you.

Treat him like the family he’s always been for you, which I hope you now realize, and maybe you two can find your way back there again someday.

Tell Nonna Lisi I said hello. She promises to remind you that the worst messes can sometimes turn into something worth loving.

And more than anything, sweetheart — thank you, always, for letting me love you,

Grant

Looking around the kitchen now, with all the loves of my life giggling while they play in piles of flour on all sides of me, I can feel his presence here, too.

The very first love of my life.

And I know that he was right. Silas was always meant to be a part of our family, of my family. I just needed a little nudge to find my way back to him again.

THE END