Chapter 10 - The Eighteenth Present
The following Christmas, there were eighteen presents beneath the tree.
Emma counted them because counting no longer hurt.
The gathering was smaller.
Rosa sat near the window with a cushion beneath her repaired wrist, complaining that everyone had become excessively concerned about her walking outside.
Ruth stood beside her, unimpressed.
“You fell into a hedge.”
“It was a low hedge.”
“That doesn’t improve the story.”
Emma laughed from the doorway.
For a moment, she simply watched the room.
The housekeeper was going home early to her children. Dinner had been prepared by a catering team whose staff were being paid holiday rates.
Nobody expected Emma to serve.
Nobody asked her where a dish belonged while she was trying to sit down.
At the table, a place card bore her name.
Not Mrs. Lorenzo Moretti.
Emma.
She had returned to the mansion gradually.
One night became a weekend.
Then a discussion about rooms, routines, and what sharing a home would mean this time.
Her bakery shifts remained hers.
Lorenzo learned that a four o’clock alarm was not an invitation to tell her to sleep later.
Sometimes he got up and made coffee.
Sometimes she kissed his shoulder and left him sleeping.
Both arrangements were allowed.
The bakery had survived its first year under shared ownership.
There had been difficult months, one broken mixer, and a wedding order Ruth still described as evidence that love impaired judgment.
There had also been a profit.
A small one.
Emma had framed the statement anyway.
Across the room, Lorenzo adjusted the tree lights.
He looked less formidable wearing a sweater with one sleeve pushed higher than the other.
His business changes had continued through the year.
They had cost him influence in rooms he once considered essential.
He had gained something harder to measure: evenings when his phone could remain facedown, employees willing to disagree, and a home where silence no longer meant someone was afraid.
Marco was not at dinner.
His repayment obligations were progressing under supervision. Contact remained limited.
Victoria had sent Rosa flowers and Emma a brief letter acknowledging conduct she had once insisted was kindness.
Emma had read it.
She had not invited her.
Reconciliation was no longer a holiday requirement.
After dinner, Rosa insisted on distributing the presents.
“One at a time,” she announced. “I want to see what people think of them.”
Ruth looked at Emma.
“Dangerous policy.”
The first gifts were modest.
A cookbook covered with Ruth’s handwritten corrections.
A gardening stool for Rosa, who declared it unnecessary before immediately trying it.
A framed photograph of the bakery staff.
Then Lorenzo placed a small package in Emma’s hands.
She looked at him.
“No diamonds?”
“No diamonds.”
Inside lay a fountain pen.
Dark blue.
Comfortable in her hand.
Beneath it was a leather notebook.
She opened the cover.
For all the things you choose to build next.
Lorenzo had signed his name.
Emma’s eyes filled.
“You found the old one?”
“In the office archives.”
“Did you read it?”
“Every page.”
He had brought it home months earlier.
Inside were business notes, phone numbers, and the fading imprint of the hopeful sentence she had written at the beginning of their marriage.
He had kept the notebook.
This time, he had understood the gift.
Emma closed the new one carefully.
“Thank you.”
“There’s one more.”
She gave him a look.
“It’s not expensive,” he said quickly.
Ruth laughed.
“Good recovery.”
The last package contained a photograph.
Emma stood outside Harrington’s on the morning she became a co-owner, laughing with flour on one sleeve.
Lorenzo had not been in the picture.
For once, a photograph celebrating her life did not require him at the center of it.
On the back, he had written:
I’m proud of the woman you were before I learned to pay attention.
Emma pressed her lips together.
Then she stood and kissed him.
Not for the presents.
Not because the year had been flawless.
Because the man holding her had spent twelve months learning that love did not become real simply because he felt it.
He had to make room for her to feel it, too.
Later, after Ruth went upstairs to the guest room and Rosa retired, Emma found Lorenzo in the kitchen.
He was washing a crystal serving bowl.
She leaned against the doorway.
“You can leave that.”
“I know.”
She came beside him and picked up the towel.
For a while, they worked without speaking.
Snow gathered beyond the windows.
The house was quiet.
Then Lorenzo glanced at her.
“Are you happy?”
Emma considered the question seriously.
“Yes.”
He smiled.
She touched his wrist.
“Not because you bought the right things.”
“I know.”
“Because I can tell you when I’m not.”
He turned off the water.
“And I’ll listen.”
Emma dried the bowl and set it safely on the shelf.
Then she took his hand, switched off the kitchen light, and walked upstairs beside him.
May you like
For the first time, she had received everything she wanted for Christmas.
And none of it required her to disappear."
