SHADES OF LOVE

CHAPTER 1

You gazed out towards the horizon. You hadn't looked at the time yet, but it must have been early – the sun was low in the sky and the sand still felt cool beneath your feet. Alice's excited cries reached you from where she played at the water's edge, and you watched her hop up and down as the cold water lapped at her feet.

She loved the sea. Every morning you woke up in the beach house, she would already be throwing her night clothes off, pulling on her swimming costume on and sprinting down to the beach as fast as she could run. You would be stumbling out of bed and rushing to dress, so you could follow her out into the bright morning, calling admonishments to her for going outside unaccompanied. Every time your words fell on deaf ears because each new morning yesterday's entreaties would be forgotten in Alice's excitement to get back to the water.

It had been around a year since you shifted your hours at the hotel to part-time and started graduate school, returning home at the end of the day feeling exhausted but happy. You were investing everything in your teacher training programme, as much as in your work and your precious daughter, so at the end of the day you'd run out of gas. But that's where Ignazio came in. He fueled you in some way. He made you feel alive and made your time worthwhile.

One thing you had learned about being a single mum throughout the years was that you get to weed out the jerks quickly – whether you wanted them to or not, the players would run away screaming while the good guys would stick around. And Ignazio stuck around.

In fact, he had this yearning to take care of you - to take care of both of you - and it seemed to consume him. You wondered why he was so impatient. He had told you he'd never felt this urgency before, that normally he was the one who panicked about commitment.

"Maybe I was just too used to always getting my way?" he once confided to you. "You never made those kinds of demands of me. Instead you are so fearful of giving up your independence, reluctant to allow yourself to be looked after. It is hardly surprising given your history, you know?" He scowled, as he always did when he thought about David and how he had walked out on a pregnant teenage (y/n). You realised he would always tense up, involuntarily clenching his fists, whenever Alice's father's name came up.

You could tell Ignazio tried not to worry about David when he had to be away from you, but to say he didn't would have been a lie. David had been your first love. He was Alice's father, yours was a special relationship and there was nothing Ignazio could do to change that. He hadn't forgotten that David had wanted to rekindle your relationship when he had found out that you were seeing someone new. 

They had only met once, when you and Ignazio went to collect Alice from her grandparents' a few months earlier, and it was awkward. In the short time they had been in the same room, the two men had not spoken. Ignazio had shaken David's hand when it was proffered, but he'd given no returning smile. You could tell he'd been too busy trying not to allow the irrational possessive rage that was creeping up inside of him and threatening to burst out show on his face to risk trying to smile.

You were trying your best to be patient with David, as well as encouraging, as he carved out a new life for himself after his time in rehab. You knew Ignazio thought that he didn't deserve your support, not after the way he had treated you, that he didn't deserve to have a second chance at being a father after what he had done, but David did seem to be committed to building a relationship with Alice and to sticking around. Ignazio couldn't help but to admire you for putting the past behind and doing what was best for Alice. But you knew he would have been happier if David had stayed in the past.

***

You were having Ignazio's sister, her husband and their two boys for lunch. They were visiting Bologna that weekend, so you thought it would be nice to invite them to join you for the rest of the day.