Juliet

The Lincoln was parked discreetly over by the fire pit, and no one saw Umberto placing my old pack in the trunk before opening the back door for me with measured ceremony.
‘I want to sit in front. Please?’
He shook his head in disapproval and opened the passenger door instead. ‘I knew it would all come apart.’
But it had never been Aunt Rose who insisted on the formality. Although Umberto was her employee, she had always treated him like family. The gesture, however, was never returned. Whenever Aunt Rose would invite Umberto to join us at the dinner table, he would merely look at her with bemused forbearance, as if it was an ongoing wonder to him why she kept asking and just somehow didn’t get it. He ate all his meals in the kitchen, always had, always would, and not even the name of sweet Jesus – spoken in rising exasperation – could persuade him to come and sit down with us, even at Thanksgiving.
Aunt Rose used to dismiss Umberto’s peculiarity as a European thing and smoothly segue into a lecture about tyranny, liberty, and independence that would inevitably culminate in her pointing a fork at us and snorting, ‘and that is why we are not going to Europe on vacation. Especially Italy. End of story.’ Personally, I was fairly certain that Umberto preferred to eat alone simply because he considered his own company vastly superior to what we had to offer. There he was, serene in the kitchen, with his

Instead, he reached out and touched my cheek the way he had done that day at Fontebranda, and this time, I knew exactly what he meant. Whether or not we had truly been cursed, and whether or not we had now paid our dues, he was my blessing, and I was his, and that was enough to disarm any missile that fate – or Shakespeare – might still be foolish enough to hurl our way.

Your description of that young man, Romeo, makes me certain he is the true knight you were so patiently waiting for.