Chapter Two Lorenzo
CHAPTER TWO
Lorenzo
L ike clockwork, I stop by Rose & Thorn every week to pick up my two bouquets.
The task has become an essential part of my routine and, frankly, something I’ve looked forward to since I moved to Lake Wisteria almost two years ago.
My schedule of campaigning and never-ending meetings can be taxing at times, but something about the floral shop located in the town’s quiet Historic District and the carefree florist who runs it breaks up the monotony of my life.
The same florist who chose a grueling, thirty-minute walk in the middle of a heat wave over my offer to drive her home.
I’m reminded of Lily’s decision as I step out of Rose & Thorn with my order. Her car is still abandoned across the street—if I can even call the hunk of metal she owns a car .
Lily claims the billionaire Lopez cousins are like family to her, but if that’s the case, why are they allowing her to drive around in a rusting metal death trap with a rear bumper held together by prayers and duct tape?
Or better yet, why hasn’t her sister, who is a wildly successful interior designer, gifted her a car?
From my point of view, it seems like no one cares enough about her safety to step in and send the car straight to the junkyard.
I try to remind myself that Lily isn’t my problem—how I made sure she would never become one either—but then I remember the state of her testing dipstick, worn tires, and serpentine belt, which looks one rotation away from breaking.
Given her stubbornness and general dislike toward me, I don’t trust Lily to follow up with most of the concerns I noted, so I’ll take it upon myself to make sure her car gets the full workup. If the Lopez cousins get pissed off about it, even better.
I grab my phone and reach out to Manny, the mechanic who became my friend after I hired him to service my twenty cars. Before he inserted himself into my life, I only had two friends in town—Willow, who I pay to help me with my campaign, and Ellie, who happens to be her best friend.
ME
Will you do me a favor?
MANNY
For my best friend? Of course.
I roll my eyes.
ME
What’s the going rate for a new battery, serpentine belt, and an oil change?
MANNY
For you? A day driving your Ferrari.
ME
No.
MANNY
Okay. I understand. What about the superbike?
ME
Do you even know how to drive a motorcycle?
MANNY
No, but I’m thinking about having you park it outside Last Call so I can stand by it and hope a woman takes me up on a ride.
ME
And if they do?
MANNY
I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.
ME
It’s a real mystery why you’re single.
MANNY
Is that a no on the superbike?
ME
Yes.
MANNY
I take it the Lambo is also off-limits?
ME
You guessed correctly.
MANNY
Fine. I’ll send an invoice for the battery and belt, but friends and family get free oil changes.
ME
Thanks. The tow truck will drop off Lily’s car in an hour.
MANNY
Lily…Munoz?
ME
Yes?
MANNY
Interesting.
MANNY
You sure you don’t want to ask her out on a date?
I ignore his question and ask one of my own.
ME
Fix the car first thing in the morning?
MANNY
Morning? I plan on heading to the shop now and getting started once it arrives.
My good deed is quickly spiraling into something else thanks to Manny’s ability to romanticize the mundane.
ME
That’s unnecessary.
MANNY
Nonsense. Can you imagine what she’ll think about you if she wakes up to find out you already had her car fixed?
Doubt anything will change her opinion of me, but Manny isn’t aware of what happened between Lily and me. No one is.
ME
I’d rather we not find out.
MANNY
Please. It’ll be part of my best man speech when you get married because of me.
Manny is both a romantic and a certified yapper—two qualities I’m uninterested in exposing myself to—but he is also thoroughly up to date on all the town gossip, so I’ve accepted his quirks in exchange for information.
MANNY
For the record, my full name is Emanuel, so feel obliged to name your first kid after me.
I pocket my phone and ignore the way it vibrates from whatever ridiculous messages Manny is sending me right now about Lily.
During the charity softball game two weeks ago, he caught me checking out Lily, but he didn’t say anything until after he saw us having a little chat at Last Call after the game.
Should Manny decide to make a big deal about this, I’ll remind him and anyone else how I’m helping someone in need…even if that someone happens to be the woman I pushed away because falling in love with her isn’t an option.
I take a seat in front of the one-way mirror as Willow, my publicist, campaign manager, and unsolicited friend, sits beside me.
We both watch as a campaign volunteer walks into a conference room full of townspeople.
She asks the focus group to have a seat at the long table before she reviews today’s payment and the rules.
“Please feel free to be as honest as you’d like while answering the questions. Your paperwork will remain anonymous, and anything you say in this room will be kept private.”
The ten people fill out the paperwork full of questions. A woman I once politely turned down after she asked me out on a date looks up from her clipboard and clocks the one-way mirror, but thankfully she doesn’t say anything to the rest of the group.
Once an elderly man with a pocket protector and aviator reading glasses finishes his set of questions, the volunteer asks the first one.
“In your opinion, what are the three biggest problems facing Lake Wisteria today?”
A few people share similar responses: property taxes increasing, the growing class divide, a similar concern I have about a billionaire real estate developer named Julian Lopez turning older homes into summer houses for the new and more affluent residents.
I’m not surprised by everyone’s answers to the next set of questions, although I’m bothered by how they respond to the volunteer asking, “If you had to pick between Lorenzo Vittori and Trevor Ludlow, who do you think would do a better job protecting the town’s interests?”
It’s nearly a clean sweep in Trevor’s favor despite his family playing a significant role in all their concerns, and it makes me question what I’m doing wrong because I’m campaigning in their best interests.
Trevor Ludlow—like his father, who is retiring this election season—comes from a long line of town mayors, so his nepotistic connections run deep. Their family is a pillar in the community, while I’m still viewed as an outsider despite my Lake Wisteria birth certificate.
Maybe if people knew more about the man vying to replace his father, they’d reconsider, but that’s one of my biggest problems with this campaign. No one knows the truth about Trevor and what he cost my family, so they have no problem voting for him.
“Does anyone want to expand on their answer?” the volunteer asks.
The elderly man with five different pens inside his front pocket readjusts his glasses. “Trevor Ludlow is the best choice—even if he’s new to the job. His family has run the city council since it was founded, so I trust him to uphold our values and traditions.”
A woman with pink stripes in her hair nods. “And he’s one of us.”
People easily forget or ignore how I spent the first decade of my life growing up in this town until I became an orphan.
Another man in his early forties talks next. “Yeah, I agree. There’s something about Lorenzo that I don’t trust.”
Next to me, Willow scribbles on her notepad, jotting everyone’s points down as if we haven’t heard them countless times before.
“What do you mean?” someone calls from the corner of the table.
“Doesn’t anyone find it strange how he came out of nowhere two years ago and decided to run for mayor? It’s not as if he has deep ties to the town, and he isn’t like Trevor, who has a legacy he wants to protect, so what’s his deal?”
Revenge. Simple as that.
I look forward to dismantling life as the Ludlows know it, and it all starts with removing them from their century-long position of power. For a family who values their pride, reputation, and social status, losing the election will be a huge blow they probably won’t recover from.
“And what about a family? I heard Lorenzo hates kids, so it’s not like he plans on settling down here,” the woman with pink hair adds.
“He’d have to be open to dating to want that,” the woman I rejected says while looking at the mirror.
Safe to assume I’ll never get her vote.
“Maybe it’s for the best. We don’t need him bringing his family’s mafia business here,” the forty-year-old man with a blue ball cap on says.
Another person chimes in with “Oh, I heard about that. Do you think that’s why he sold his shares of the family company?”
“He did?” someone else asks.
“Yeah. A random article I read online mentioned how he and his uncle would get in arguments during board meetings. Nearly came to blows once.”
Yes, while that is accurate, I would’ve put up with my uncle if it weren’t for how he hid the truth about my parents’ accident. After I found out what really happened, I quit my job as the director of operations, sold my Vittori Holdings shares, and walked away without looking back.
A quiet member of the group speaks next. “Apparently his uncle hired a hitman to kill Lorenzo’s father, which is why they never found the person responsible for the hit-and-run accident.”
Yet another lie.
“I always thought it was strange how the Vittoris mostly kept to themselves. Lorenzo’s mother was nice and involved in the church, but there was always something…off about his father,” the same man in a ball cap says.
If by off he means diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, then fuck him very much. My father was a good man, although his struggle with OCD could be downright debilitating—a daily mental battle I’m all too familiar with thanks to my own diagnosis.
I want to barge in there and say No, I don’t hate children and No , I’m not involved in the mafia, although I can’t say the same for my uncle and cousins who are in the casino business —a fact the Ludlow family likes to remind everyone all too often.
My teeth grind together, and I reach inside my pants pocket and pull out my lucky dice. I roll the glass cubes between my fingers, the familiarity of the indentations soothing me until I’m no longer seething.
The volunteer scrambles to get the session back in order, but the focus group quickly goes from gathering useful intel to people making the most inaccurate assumptions about me.
After spending the last year campaigning on ideas like preserving the town’s historic character and improving local services for the youth and elderly townspeople alike, it’s frustrating to be typecast as something I’m not.
If I don’t find a way to improve my image and give people the confidence to vote for me, I’ll never be able to catch up to Trevor Ludlow. And if I don’t do it soon, my nightmare scenario will quickly become an unbearable reality.