This wine was his passion, his life. It needed to be done.
“Right.” I took off my gloves. I started the fire and tried to warm up the vast space. And then I began. I sorted the now-corrected labels and gathered the empty bottles and corks that would be used. I got the sanitation fluid and siphon and began the arduous task of cleaning the wine bottles. It took me hours, but I didn’t stop. I needed to keep going.
As I finished cleaning the last bottle, someone coughed from the doorway. I lifted my head. Zeno walked into the barn, his hands in the pockets of his dark jeans. He was wearing a sweater, scarf and gloves. Like this, he looked just like everybody else. No suit, no attitude, just . . . normal.
But my anger toward him was still simmering. For how he treated Achille, calling him slow, insulting his late father so brutally. For trying to ruin the letter, and for casting him from his land like he was nothing.
“What do you want?” I asked tersely.
Zeno stopped dead. I waited for him to hiss something back, but he bowed his head in defeat. “I didn’t come here to fight with you, Caresa.” I didn’t say anything in response. Zeno stepped forward, looking at what I had been doing, at the bottles that had been cleaned. “What are you doing?”
“Bottling,” I said tightly, then carried on with my task, washing away the sanitizing solution and preparing the siphon to get the aged wine from the barrels.
“You know how to do this?”
Zeno came to stand beside me, watching me with interest. I nodded. “Achille taught me before . . .” He left, I wanted to say. But if I did, I knew I would lose control of my anger and take it out on Zeno.
“He taught you the entire process for the merlot?”
I nodded again, then dropped the siphon I was holding. I rested my back against the counter, remembering when Achille had prepared lunch and made coffee for me in those first few days. I had to quickly rid myself of those thoughts. If I let them, they would drown me in sadness.
And I had a job to do.
Zeno rested his back beside me and stared out of the barn doors at the lightly falling snow. “You are here everyday?”
“Yes,” I replied. “The horses need caring for, and I knew today was the first day of bottling. I knew . . . I knew Achille would want this done. He cares for this wine like no one would ever understand. It is his entire life.” I flicked my eyes up to Zeno. “It is all he has in the entire world. Without this, he would be so lost. The outside world overwhelms him. You . . . you read in the letter that his father kept him sheltered, and why. So your father wouldn’t be suspected of being Achille’s papa.” I swallowed back the burgeoning lump in my throat. “If he doesn’t come back . . . if he doesn’t ever return . . . he would want this year’s wine completed.”
I looked right at Zeno. He was looking back at me with an unreadable expression on his face. “He believes this wine will be the greatest yet,” I said. “Though I’m sure anything he produces would be great.” I shook my head. “You have no idea of the kind of man he is, Zeno. He cares so much, he loves so much and so deeply that I’ve never seen anything like it.” A tear fell down my cheek as I whispered, “He just wants so desperately to be loved back. He deserves to be loved back. He doesn’t deserve all of these blows life keeps giving him—never knowing his mother, his father dying young, and now all of this.” I studied Zeno. “You are not so dissimilar, you know. You have both lost your fathers, never truly got to know your mothers. And you both have had to shoulder these burdens alone.” I wiped away the tear and stared at the ground. “But Achille doesn’t have the tools you do to cope with things. And he should. Because if anyone deserves happiness and love, it’s him. It’ll always be him.”
Zeno didn’t say anything for the longest time, until he ran a hand down his face and whispered, “You love him, Caresa. You truly love Achille.”
I laughed a humorless laugh and fought not to crumble. “Yes . . . he is my split-apart.”
Zeno looked confused, but then said, “I will be gone for a couple of days. I’m going to see my Uncle Roberto in Florence.” He paused. “I have to know the truth. I . . . I have thought of nothing else for the past week. How we used to be so close as children.” Zeno laughed, but it was pained and short. “I think . . . I think he was the best friend I ever had.” He cleared his throat. “Turns out there might have been a reason for that. He may be my brother. My best friend, who I was told by my father and mother I could never see again, could have been the very thing I had always wished for—a brother to laugh with and share my life.”
“His father would not have lied about this.”
“I know that,” he said sadly. “I knew Signor Marchesi. He was a good man. As is Achille.”
“And yet you sent him away,” I said softly.
Zeno stilled. “I know that too.”
He pushed off the counter’s edge and walked to the doors. Just as he left, I said. “None of this is real, you know?” Zeno stopped and, with tense shoulders, turned my way. I pushed off the counter too. “All this, the world we live in. It’s all a mirage. We live like the aristocrats of old, talking of pride and ancestral honor, but it’s all pretend. The country doesn’t recognize us as anyone special anymore, just the relatives of people who used to be someone once. Our titles are by name only, the official lineage papers that we add to with each new birth are practically forged.
“We all pretend that we live in castles made of stone, but in reality they are made of sand, one bluster of wind away from crumbling into the sea of the long-forgotten past. We talk of the lowly classes beneath us as though they are no better than dirt on the bottom of our shoes. But like the gods of old to the mortals of Earth, in truth we envy them, because at least they are free. Tell me, Zeno, who lives the better life? Us, sitting on our fake thrones alone, or them, who spend every second with their soul mates beside them, raising families and loving hard? We are fools because we see ourselves as better, when really we are all just miserable pawns in the great chess game that is our heritage.”
Zeno inhaled deeply. “Yet you and I are still betrothed. We still do as our parents wish.”
The same numbness I had felt all day wrapped over me like a protective blanket, staving off the grief of Achille’s absence. “And isn’t that just the most curious thing?” I said tiredly. “The most curious thing of all. That we know all this, yet do absolutely nothing about it?”
“It was never my intention to make you unhappy, Caresa,” Zeno said softly, and I knew he meant every word.
“I know,” I whispered back. “But it was never in your power to make me happy either. That honor belonged to someone else. It was written in the stars, way before we were born.”
Zeno bowed his head and turned to leave. As I turned my back too, I said, “He would make a better prince than we would ever make a king or queen. Achille is the kind of man you would want at the helm of your family’s legacy. He is the special one here, not you or me.”
I assumed Zeno had left when no answer immediately came. But then just as I took the siphon to bottle the first wine, I heard a whisper. “I know that, Duchessa. Believe me, I’m beginning to see that too.”
Zeno’s whispered words sailed on the wind and struck my heart. And in that moment I wished that the wind were stronger, because then it could drift to wherever Achille was and reach his ears. Because that was the kind of sentiment he should hear.
From his brother.
His onetime best friend.
Someone who should have loved him all his life.
And the brother that maybe now realized he wanted Achille to return . . . nearly as much as I did.
Chapter Fifteen
Sicily, Italy
Achille
“Are those hands still giving you trouble, Achille?”
I froze, holding the wine bottle clumsily in my hands. My zia Noelia stopped beside me and put her hands on her hips.
I shrugged but continued bottling, using the techniques I had adopted over the years to cope with how sometimes my hands just would not work they way they were supposed to.