The coastline in Italy looks almost unreal in the way things do when they’ve been photographed too much and still refuse to lose their power.

Cliffs stacked in warm stone. Water so clean it feels edited. Villas clinging to hillsides like they’ve grown there instead of been built. Everything is light and heat and distance softened by salt air.

The Roy entourage arrives like weather.

Private transfers, sunglasses, the faint hum of entitlement. Shiv is already irritated before she even steps onto the terrace of the coastal hotel—because she can feel something is off in the configuration of people.

Then she sees it.

Tom.

And you.

It isn’t even the fact you’re there that hits first—it’s how unremarkable the chaos feels around you.

You’re walking slightly ahead of him, not because he’s leading you, but because you’ve stopped to look at a small handwritten menu outside a seaside café, head tilted in focus.

Sky light catches the fabric of your dress, soft and effortless against the coastal stone. A small heart at your collarbone, teardrop earrings shifting when you move. You look like you belong to the temperature, not the room.

Tom, meanwhile, looks like a man who has been released into a different ecosystem without proper instruction.

He’s trying very hard not to look like he’s enjoying himself too much.

It’s failing.

“Okay,” he says, hovering just behind you, voice too bright, “I think I’ve already emotionally committed to gelato. Like, I don’t even know what flavors are available, but I feel… loyal to it.”

You don’t look up from the menu.

“Stracciatella is the safe option,” you say. “But the pistachio here is probably actual pistachio, not neon-green sugar paste.”

“That sentence just changed my life,” Tom says solemnly.

Shiv sees it then.

Not the affection—that would be too simple.

It’s the ease.

Tom is not performing himself upward. He is not bracing for judgment. He is… following you. Softly. Willingly. Like he’s stopped trying to win a game and started just walking.

And worse—he looks good like this.

Not powerful. Not sharpened. Just present.

Shiv approaches with the kind of smile that has learned to arrive before emotion does.

“Well,” she says, voice light, controlled. “This is… unexpected.”

Tom turns too fast.

“Hey—uh—hi,” he says, instantly recalibrating into Roy-adjacent mode, then failing halfway through and defaulting back into something more human. “We—Marion wanted to see the coast properly, so…”

Marion.

Shiv looks at you more directly now.

You are still reading the menu like it matters more than the social rupture happening ten feet away.

There is no apology in your posture. No performance of taking up less space. Just attention placed exactly where you want it.

Shiv’s eyes flick between you and Tom.

“Right,” she says slowly. “Of course you did.”

There’s an implication in it—one she expects to land.

It doesn’t.

Because you finally glance up and say, pleasantly:

“Have you tried the seafood here? It’s usually overpriced in the harbor strip. I was thinking we should walk a bit inland.”

Silence.

Not hostile. Not defensive.

Just… non-reaction.

Tom, sensing tension like a dog sensing weather, rushes in slightly too late.

“She’s—she’s really good at finding places that aren’t, like, traps for tourists,” he says, almost proudly. “Which I didn’t even know was a thing I needed in my life, but apparently I did.”

Shiv stares at him.

For a fraction of a second, something flickers—hurt, anger, disbelief—but it doesn’t get to fully form into its usual shape.

Because Tom isn’t flinching toward her.

He’s not looking to be pulled back into orbit.

He’s looking at you.

Like you’re the stable point.

Shiv’s voice sharpens just a little.

“So you’re… doing Italy together.”

Tom hesitates. The old instinct would be to soften, to hedge, to triangulate.

Instead, he says, carefully but plainly:

“Yeah. We are.”

No apology. No performance.

Just fact.

You, meanwhile, have already folded the menu and are scanning the street beyond the terrace.