The phone screen lit up the dark hotel room.
Enzo opened his eyes.
He looked at the ceiling for exactly one second — the particular stillness of a man who had been asleep and was now entirely awake, because that was simply how he moved between states — then he reached for his phone.
Group video call.
He already knew.
He accepted it.
Three faces appeared on the screen simultaneously with the coordinated energy of people who had planned this and saw absolutely no reason to pretend otherwise.
"Hey bro," Matteo said warmly.
"Hi baby!" Aiden said, with his brightest smile.
"Hi big bro," Adrian said quietly, from what appeared to be a very comfortable armchair.
Enzo looked at all three of them.
"Hi guys," he said. Then he looked at Aiden specifically. "And you — I have warned you several times to stop calling me baby."
The corner of his mouth moved.
Just slightly.
"But Nonna calls you baby," Aiden said reasonably.
"Are you Nonna?"
"I feel like I have her energy sometimes—"
"You absolutely do not." Enzo shifted against his pillow and looked at all three of them with the calm expression of a man who had accepted his fate. "Alright. Just say whatever it is you called to say."
Matteo smiled.
It was the specific smile of a younger brother who had been holding something for exactly the right moment and had decided this was it.
"Giorgio told us," he said pleasantly, "that you took Rosalina along on this trip."
Enzo said nothing.
"Just for the record," Aiden said, his smile fading into something more genuine and more direct, "you never took Clara on any of your trips. Not once in three years." He looked at Enzo steadily. "And I just want to say — I like Rosalina. I really like her. And I am never going to stand by and let you break her soft heart. I mean that."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Vincenzo Ian Salvatore," Matteo said, with the full solemn weight of a man deploying a full name as a weapon, "do you by any chance have feelings for your beautiful PA?"
"Can you guys just—" Enzo started.
"Give him a chance to explain himself," Adrian said, from his armchair, with a small smile that suggested he was finding this deeply entertaining.
Enzo looked at all three of them.
"I don't like her in that way," he said clearly. "Whatever way you're all thinking — it's not that. You overthink everything, all of you, constantly." He sat up slightly. "I brought her along because she is diligent. She's smart. She's intelligent and focused and hardworking. That is why she's here. That's the only reason."
Silence.
Matteo looked at Aiden.
Aiden looked at Matteo.
Adrian looked at the ceiling.
"Interesting," Matteo said slowly. "My brother — who does not talk too much, who has never in his life described a member of his staff with more than two words — just described his new PA with…" he counted on his fingers, "…five."
"Bet he's never described Giorgio with that many words," Aiden said. "Or Clara. Or anyone."
"I have described Giorgio—"
"With five words?" Matteo said. "Five specific, personal, complimentary words?"
"You guys are impossible," Enzo said. "I don't like her in that way. I don't. And don't any of you have actual things to do instead of calling me at this hour to—"
"It's afternoon here in Milan," Aiden said cheerfully. "Duhhh."
"It is morning here," Enzo said, with considerable restraint. "You woke me up." He looked at Adrian. "Adrian. Remind me when I get back to deduct from Giorgio's salary. He cannot be working for two bosses."
Adrian's smile widened fully — the rare, complete smile that appeared on his face approximately three times a year and meant he was genuinely delighted.
"Alright bro," he said. "I will."
"You will do no such thing," Matteo said firmly, pointing at the screen, "or I will personally tell the entire family about this Spain trip and everything that Giorgio told me about it."
A pause.
Enzo looked at his brother.
"I hate you guys," he said.
"We love you bro," Matteo said immediately.
"With all our lives," Aiden added, hand on heart.
"Every single day," Adrian confirmed quietly.
"See you back in Milan," Matteo said warmly. "And send our regards to Rosalina."
"You wish," Enzo said.
But he was smiling.
A full, real, unhurried smile — the kind that reached his eyes and stayed there — as he ended the call and set his phone down on the hotel nightstand.
He looked at the Barcelona morning coming in through the curtains.
He got up.
He was still smiling when he went to shower.
He called her at nine forty-five.
"Be ready in fifteen minutes," he said when she picked up. "And bring a sweater. It gets cool in the shade."
A brief pause on her end.
"Understood," she said.
He ended the call and went to finish getting ready.
She was ready at ten exactly.
Of course she was.
In the elevator going down he said — without looking at her, watching the floor numbers decrease — "We'll have breakfast first. There's a local place near the market. Not a hotel restaurant."
She looked at him sideways.
"Alright sir," she said.
The doors opened and they walked out into the Barcelona morning.
The restaurant was small and warm and tucked into a narrow street that smelled like fresh bread and coffee and something frying that made Rosalina's stomach make a decision before she had.
It was run by a couple — old and comfortable together in the way people became comfortable when they had shared a very long time. The woman showed them to a table near the window with the unhurried warmth of someone who ran her restaurant like her home and saw no reason to make a distinction. The man brought coffee without being asked and set it down between them with a broad smile.
They ordered. The food came quickly — simple and extraordinary in the way food was extraordinary when it was made by people who cared about it.
Rosalina looked out of the window at the narrow Barcelona street and thought that this was possibly the nicest breakfast she had ever had in her life.
She was halfway through it when the old woman appeared beside their table.
She looked at them both — at Enzo, at Rosalina, at the small table between them and the morning light and the coffee cups — with the warm assessing eyes of a woman who had been watching people for a very long time and knew what she saw.
"You make a beautiful couple," she said warmly, in accented English. "Very beautiful together, you two."
She smiled at them both and moved back toward the kitchen.
The table went very quiet.
Rosalina looked at her plate.
Then — because she could feel it happening and had no way to stop it — she looked up.
Enzo was already looking at her.
Their eyes met across the small table in the narrow Barcelona restaurant with the morning light coming through the window and the old woman's words still warm in the air between them.
And then Enzo Salvatore — cold, controlled, precise, impossible Enzo Salvatore — laughed.
A real laugh. Full and genuine and entirely unexpected — the kind that started somewhere deep and came out without asking permission. It transformed his face completely for the length of it, the green eyes creasing at the corners, the jaw losing every bit of its usual precision.
Rosalina stared at him.
She had worked beside this man for two months. She had seen him handle legal crises and board meetings and Matteo on a Tuesday and Gabriella in a restaurant in Barcelona. She had catalogued every silence and every four word sentence and every version of fine that didn't mean fine.
She had never seen him laugh like that.
Not once.
"Sir," she said, and then stopped because she had no idea what she had intended to say after that.
He collected himself — not quickly, which was itself remarkable — and looked back at his coffee.
"Eat your breakfast Miss Evans," he said.
She ate her breakfast.
She was smiling at her plate for the rest of it.
Barcelona in the morning was everything she had seen from the hotel window at night and more.
Enzo walked beside her through it with his hands in his pockets and his sunglasses on and the easy unhurried energy of a man who knew where he was going and was in no particular rush to get there. He told her things — about the architecture, about the history of the streets they walked through, about the market and the cathedral and the specific way the light fell on certain buildings at certain times of day.
He spoke about it the way he spoke about documents he found genuinely interesting — with precision and without performance, the information offered because it was worth knowing and not because he needed her to think well of him for knowing it.
She listened to all of it.
She also looked at all of it — the colours and the stone and the streets that were nothing like Milan and entirely beautiful in their own way. The Barcelona sky impossibly blue above the old buildings. The people moving through it with the particular ease of people at home in a place they loved.
She thought about the small apartment and the third burner that didn't work.
She thought about Brian telling her she was going to Spain like it was the most normal thing in the world, eating his cereal, entirely unbothered.
She thought that she was going to remember this day for a very long time.
They had been walking for a while when Enzo stopped near a small square with a row of trees providing shade and a vendor selling ice cream nearby.
"Wait here," he said simply.
He walked toward the vendor.
Rosalina stood in the shade and pulled out her phone. Brian had messaged twice — a photo of his lunch which appeared to be crackers and something unidentifiable, and a voice note that she played with her ear against the phone.
She smiled.
She called him back.
He picked up on the second ring, already talking, telling her about something that had happened at school with the easy energy of a twelve year old who had had an excellent day and wanted to share every detail of it.
"I miss you Rosie," he said, somewhere in the middle of it.
"I miss you too baby," she said warmly. "So much. I'll be home tonight."
"Okay good. Love you."
"I love you too baby," she said. "Take your—"
"Drugs," he said. "I know. I'm a big boy."
She was still smiling when she ended the call.
Enzo was standing beside her.
He had two ice creams — simple cones, the kind you got from a vendor in a square on a warm morning — and was holding one out to her with the easy naturalness of a man who had walked back from a vendor with ice cream and saw no reason to make an event of it.
She took it.
"Thank you," she said.
He sat down on the bench beneath the shade and she sat beside him and for a moment they just ate ice cream in the Barcelona square in a comfortable quiet that felt — she noted this carefully — entirely natural.
Then Enzo said, without looking at her:
"Your documents said you were single."
She looked at him.
He was eating his ice cream with his usual focused calm and looking at the square ahead of them.
"I am single," she said.
"The call," he said simply.
She looked at him for one more second.
Then she understood.
And she smiled — a real one, wide and warm — before she could stop it.
"That was Brian," she said. "My younger brother. He's twelve. He calls to check up on me when I am not around." She paused. "He calls me Rosie. I call him baby. It's just — what we do."
Enzo was quiet for a moment.
"Ah," he said.
"Did you think I lied on my employment documents?" she said. Genuinely curious.
"I thought it was possible," he said. "People do."
"I wouldn't do that," she said simply.
He looked at her then — briefly, directly, with that green gaze that had learned over two months to land on her differently than it landed on everything else.
"No," he said. "I don't think you would."
He looked back at the square.
They finished their ice cream.
Lunch was at a small restaurant near the waterfront that Enzo chose without consulting anyone — the way he chose most things — and it was, Rosalina decided, the best meal she had eaten in her entire life.
Afterwards they walked.
The afternoon was warm and the streets near the waterfront were full and beautiful and she was so busy looking at everything that she almost walked into a display outside a clothing store before Enzo stepped slightly sideways and she course corrected without either of them saying anything about it.
She looked at the store window.
Enzo looked at it too.
"How old did you say your brother was?" he said.
"Twelve," she said.
He looked at the window for another moment.
"Let's get him something," he said. He said it the way he said most things — simply, as though it had been decided and required no further discussion. "And your friend."
Rosalina turned to look at him.
"How do you know about my friend?"
He looked at her with the expression of a man about to say something that required no apology.
"Miss Evans," he said, "you were messaging her this morning in the elevator. I unintentionally saw her name on your screen." A pause. "She's saved as My Best Friend."
Rosalina opened her mouth.
Closed it.
"Okay boss," she said finally. "But you really don't need to do this. You've already done so much this trip and—"
He was already walking into the store.
She followed.
Enzo Salvatore shopping for a twelve year old boy and a woman he had never met was — she observed this from approximately two feet away — an experience she had not been prepared for.
He was systematic about it. Efficient. He moved through the store with the same focused attention he gave everything and made decisions quickly and did not second guess them. He held things up occasionally and looked at them and either put them back or added them to the growing collection in the staff member's arms who was following them with the expression of someone having a very good afternoon.
"What does he like?" he asked at one point, holding up a football jersey.
"Football," she said. "He loves football."
The jersey went into the pile.
He got Brian three things. Betty two. And then he stopped in front of a section and looked at something and then looked at Rosalina and she said absolutely not and he put it in the pile anyway and she said sir I mean it and he moved to the next thing with the calm of a man who had already won.
She gave up.
She was laughing by the time they reached the counter.
It was — she noted this in the careful way she noted things she intended to keep — the first time she had laughed properly, out loud, in front of him.
He looked at her when it happened.
Just for a moment.
Then he looked back at the counter and paid before she could say a single word about it.
They got back to the hotel as the afternoon was moving into evening — warm and tired in the good way, the way you got tired after a day that had been genuinely worth the energy.
At her door she turned to face him with her shopping bags in her hands and the Barcelona evening light behind him and approximately sixteen different things she wanted to say.
"Thank you," she said. "For today. For all of it — the breakfast and the sightseeing and the — all of it. You really didn't have to and I just—" She stopped. Collected herself. "Thank you sir."
He looked at her with that steady green gaze.
"You earned it," he said simply. "You're good at your work Miss Evans. Today was — straightforward."
She held that for a moment.
He had called a day of breakfast and ice cream and sightseeing and shopping for her brother and her best friend straightforward.
Sure he had.
"Get ready," he said. "We jet back to Milan tonight. I'll let you know the time."
He turned toward his door.
"Sir," she said.
He looked back.
"Brian is going to lose his mind over the jersey," she said.
Something moved across his face. Small. Real.
"Good," he said.
His door opened and closed.
She sat on the edge of the hotel bed with her shopping bags around her and the Barcelona evening coming through the window and a feeling in her chest that she had been carefully not naming all day.
She picked up her phone.
Betty answered on the first ring.
"TELL ME EVERYTHING," Betty said immediately.
Rosalina looked at the bags on the floor. At the blue dress hanging on the wardrobe door. At the Barcelona sky going golden outside the window.
"He bought Brian a football jersey," she said.
Betty was quiet for exactly two seconds.
"Rosalina," she said.
"And he bought you things too," Rosalina added. "He saw your name on my phone. My Best Friend. He just — walked into the store and got things. For both of you. Without being asked."
Another silence.
"Rosalina Maria Evans," Betty said quietly.
"I know," Rosalina said.
"You know what?"
She looked at the Barcelona sky.
"I know," she said again. More quietly this time.
Betty didn't say anything else.
She didn't need to.
*******