He had already picked up the phone and was dialing the airline when she put down her drink and went to him. “Jack, are you planning to come with me?”

“Of course I am.”

He said it as if there had never been any doubt that he would, but she’d been alone for so long that she’d immediately assumed she’d be alone in this, too.

Only, she wasn’t alone anymore, was she? Not now that Jack loved her.

But though the trip back to her childhood home would be a thousand times harder without Jack by her side, it was her love for him that had her trying to take the phone from his hand.

“Your launch is tomorrow. I’m so sorry I’m going to miss it, that I won’t be there for you to celebrate your dream coming true, but I can’t let you miss it. Not when you’ve worked so long and hard for this day.”

“My dream came true the moment I found you, Mary. And we both know that family is what matters most. We’re going to Italy together to see your parents.”

He kissed her then, a soft press against her lips that was at once empathetic and passionate, before he put the phone back up to his ear and booked two tickets to Rome.

* * *

Mary hadn’t thought she’d be able to sleep a wink on the airplane, but with Jack sitting warm and steady beside her, his arms holding her tight, she was asleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes. By the time she woke, they were flying over Rome. Hand in hand, Mary and Jack got off the plane with their carry-on luggage.

Fear that they were already too late sent her to the first pay phone she found in the airport. But when she called the hospital, an old childhood friend who was now a nurse gave her a very welcome piece of good news: Her mother had been diagnosed with pneumonia and had spent the night at the hospital, but had been discharged this morning.

Mary told Jack, “My parents left the hospital an hour ago.”

Jack dropped a kiss onto her mouth. “Whatever you just said, I’m glad it’s good news.”

She’d been so relieved by the news her old friend had given her that she’d forgotten to switch back to English after getting off the phone.

She repeated what she’d just told him in English. “They’ve diagnosed her with pneumonia, which I know is still dangerous, but would they have sent her home if she wasn’t well enough to recover there on her own?”

“From everything you’ve told me, your mother sounds like a very strong woman.”

He was right. Lucia Ferrer was too strong willed to let illness get the best of her. Then again, Mary thought as panic rose again, she was also so stubborn that she might have let the infection go on for too long.

Jack pulled her to him and kissed the top of her head. He didn’t give her a bunch of empty words that she would have been too anxious to take in anyway. He simply told her with his steady warmth, just as he had a hundred different times since she’d met him, that he was there for her.

Now, and always.

When she felt stronger and calmer, they found a taxi to take them to her hometown. She’d been back to Italy many times during the past thirteen years, but she’d never been brave enough to go to Rosciano. Once, twice, she’d come close. But each time fear—and pride—had her turning back.

She wouldn’t turn back today.

Mary was holding Jack’s hand so tightly in the back of the airport taxi that he should have been complaining, or at least trying to pull free. He did neither; he simply held her right back, letting her know that he truly was there for her when she most needed him.

Trying to keep panic at bay, she looked at her watch and calculated the time difference. “The launch has just begun in San Francisco. Maybe we should stop at another pay phone and call Allen’s offices to check in with everyone.”

She could tell by the look in Jack’s eyes that he knew exactly what she was doing. “We don’t need to stop. We don’t need to call. I’m sure everything in San Francisco is going just fine without us.” He gently squeezed her hand. “Your hometown is beautiful, just like you described it. One day soon, I’d like my own mother to come and see this winter wonderland.”

Mary forced herself to look out the windows of the taxi, to stop and really see where she’d come from.

Christmas in Rosciano had always been the event of the year. From the strings of lights crisscrossing overhead to the beautifully built Nativity scene in the center of town, every inch was transformed with light and color. As a child, she’d spent eleven months of every year looking forward to the twelfth, and though she wasn’t a child anymore, she wasn’t at all immune to the wonder of the holiday season.

Everything, it seemed, was exactly as it had always been. The boys and girls out picking up a big tray of pastries at the pasticceria for the family lunches that would stretch on for hours. The young women, some of them barely out of their teens, cradling small babies in their arms as they met with friends by the fountain for a few precious moments before finishing the marketing and returning to their familial duties at their mother-in-law’s house. The men meeting in the bar first for an espresso and then a glass of grappa to talk of old sports dreams while making bets on teams they’d laid their new dreams of glory on. The stone buildings stood just as they had for hundreds of years. The grapevines just beyond the buildings were groomed back for winter, and the sky was a clear and crisp blue.

Mary felt as if she’d blinked at nineteen and woken up thirteen years later in the same exact place. How, she wondered, could it feel as if nothing had changed when she had changed so much in so many ways?

She’d left Italy as a naive girl full of a hunger to experience life. The beauty she’d seen, the thrills she’d experienced as she’d flitted from one spot on the globe to the next, had far exceeded her dreams. And yet, all that time, she’d still been searching, longing, for something she had never been able to find by getting on another airplane or seeing another amazing vista.

As if he could read her mind, Jack stroked his hand down over her hair and shoulders.

Love.

It was all she’d ever truly wanted, the only thing that could have made her feel whole again when she’d been broken for so long.

Jack’s love had filled so many empty places inside of her…but that hollowness right in the center that had begun to burrow into her soul as a little girl when she’d realized that she could never be what her mother wanted her to be was still there.

Finally, the taxi pulled up in front of her childhood home. And as Jack helped her out of the backseat and the driver took their bags out of the trunk, all she could think was, Oh God, this is such a bad idea. Why have I come back? Why don’t I know better?

She wanted to dive into the taxi and have it take her down the narrow cobblestone street and away from everything she was afraid of facing.

“I’m scared.” She reached for Jack’s hands and pulled them into her chest as if he could somehow get her heart to stop racing so fast. “What if my mother sees me and tells me to leave again? What if my coming here, being back in her house, makes everything worse instead of better?” They’d been in the country barely over an hour, and yet she couldn’t stop the Italian accent from quickly seeping into her words. “What if—” The fears crowding her mind piled on one another too fast for her to clearly put a voice to them. “I made so many mistakes, Jack. I can see that now. What if it’s too late to undo them?”

“Everybody makes mistakes. But that’s the magic of family—knowing that underneath whatever you’ve said and done, you are still loved. And that you always will be, no matter what.”

Jack had been right about everything else so far. She wanted desperately to believe that he was right about this, too.

Knowing she needed to be brave enough to find out, she lifted a hand she couldn’t stop from trembling to knock. Before she could make contact with the old wooden door, a gray-haired man opened it.

Her father’s face was just as she remembered it, with perhaps a few more lines, but his expression was one of a man who had just witnessed a miracle.

Oh, how she’d missed him, every single day since she’d left.

“Carissima, you’re finally home!”

On a joyful sob, Mary threw herself into her father’s open arms, still—always—his little girl.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Papa, this is Jack. Jack Sullivan. He’s the man I love. We’re going to be married.”

Despite the fact that she’d spoken in Italian, Jack didn’t seem at all surprised when her father grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks.

“Your mother will be very happy.” He took both of her hands in his. “Come see her.”

Mary’s feet felt as if they were filled with lead. “Papa? When she asked for me to come see her, was she—” She stopped speaking when she saw the guilty look on her father’s face. “She doesn’t know you called me, does she?”

“Your mother has too much pride. So do you. Your silence has gone on long enough. Come, it’s time to see and to talk to each other again.”

Perhaps her father had been wrong not to tell either Mary or her mother about what he was doing, but he’d been stuck in the middle of things for too many years. So when he pulled her through the living room and down the hall to the bedroom he shared with her mother, Mary let him. But since she knew she couldn’t do this without Jack, she reached for his hand with her free one so that the three of them were a connected chain.

Her father gave a soft knock on the door before looking inside the bedroom. “Tesoro, I have someone here to see you.”

A half-dozen questions flew through Mary’s head as her father slowly opened the door. How much would the years—and illness—have changed her mother? Would her mother see that her daughter was no longer a girl but a woman now? Would there be softness in her mother’s eyes? Or would her gaze be just as cold as it had been that horrible day so many years ago?

As Jack squeezed her freezing cold hand with his warm one in a show of support, Mary knew there was only way to find out. She sucked in a deep breath and threw her shoulders back, calling on years of poise in front of the camera to get through the hardest moment of her life.

Lucia Ferrer had always been a beautiful woman. Thirteen years had turned her dark hair fully gray, but her skin was still relatively unlined, her mouth still full, her limbs long and firm. Mary had been a girl when she’d left, but now that she was an adult, she saw in her mother’s face the same eyes, nose and chin that she saw every time she looked in the mirror. How could she have forgotten how similar they were, not just in temperament, but in looks, too?

Mary couldn’t remember her mother ever being sick when she was a child. She’d inherited that from her, too—good, healthy genes that meant she’d never once called in sick. For Lucia to spend any part of the day in bed meant that she was really and truly not well.

“Mama.”

The short, simple word sounded raw and uncertain from lack of use. Her mother looked shocked, so stunned by her daughter’s sudden reappearance in her life that she couldn’t yet speak.

How Mary longed to run into the room and reach out to her. But Lucia had yet to give any sign that she was happy to see her daughter, and the pride that was never far from the surface began to bubble up again inside Mary as it had so many years before.

Only, she was no longer a headstrong, foolish girl with only dreams and adventures ahead of her. This time, Mary was a woman who had experienced some dreams coming true and others crumbling. She’d known terrible heartbreak and then had been lucky enough to find a love that would last forever.

And, most of all, for thirteen years, she’d longed for the family she’d left behind.

Her father was right: Pride had kept her away for too long. If her mother wasn’t ready to see her again, well, that was too bad. Because it was long past time for this nonsense between them to come to an end.