Chapter 11 - The Table and the Shelf
The dining room of the Bellandi mansion had been reconfigured.
The long table beneath the chandelier was still there, but the portraits of the stern men had been moved to the library corridor. In their place hung three large, framed maps drawn in bright orange and purple crayon—the ones Leo and Nico had made during the storm, detailing the location of the invisible monkeys and the clear paths through the polar ice.
The long limestone mantelpiece above the fireplace had been cleared of its dusty crystal bowls.
In the center sat a single, plain silver cup with the name Lily Grace Keene engraved on its side—the one my cousin had sent from McMinnville to remind me that names don't collect dust when they are held by the right hands. And beside it stood three new silver cylinders, each worked with the emblem of a lion and a thorned rose.
Leo. Nico. Mia.
We sat down to dinner at five thirty, exactly when the triplets liked it. There were no carrots on the table. There was a large bowl of potato soup with leeks, three loaves of sourdough bread Arthur had brought from the valley, and a bottle of red wine Dante had opened with his own hands.
"Miss Ward—I mean, Mother," Leo said, his fork poised over his soup. "Father says the new clinic on Wacker Drive will have a greenhouse on the roof. For the ferns. Can I be the director of botany?"
"Only if Nico is the director of exploration," I said, reaching over to wipe a drop of broth from Mia’s chin with my napkin.
"And me?" Mia asked, her rabbit doll sitting in a small velvet chair Enzo had built for it beside her high chair. "What am I?"
Dante leaned across the table, his hand resting flat on the wood between us, his gray eyes glowing gold under the chandelier light. "You are the captain of the blue queen’s guard, Mia. Your job is to make sure the jays don't get into the garden."
Mia brightened, lifting her silver cup with both hands and toast-clicking it against mine with a sound that filled the wide, stone room with music. "To the guard!" she shouted.
"To the guard," Nico and Leo repeated, their cups joining hers in the center of the table.
I looked across the linen cloth at my husband. He wasn't looking at the door for permission, and he wasn't looking at his phone for a warning. He was watching his family eat their dinner in a room that was loud, warm, and entirely full of things that had been broken and fixed better than before.
May you like
The wind came off Lake Michigan, rattling the iron gates outside and throwing the snow against the high stone pillars, but the limestone didn't shake. The walls were thick enough to keep the water out, the fire was hot enough to melt the ice, and the table had plenty of room for all of us.
We were finally home. And the shelf was exactly the right size.
