3. Ysabelle
— ? —
Ysabelle
The anniversary dinner table looks beautiful.
I set it myself this afternoon. Candles in silver holders, the good china we only use twice a year, cloth napkins folded into fans the way Nonna Fe taught me. A centerpiece of yellow roses because Pietro mentioned once, years ago, that yellow was his favorite color.
The roses are wilting now. The candles have burned down to stubs. The focaccia I baked this morning sits in a basket, cold and hard, and I can’t bring myself to throw it away.
The clock reads 11:47 p.m.
Anger requires energy I don’t have anymore, so I sit at our beautiful anniversary table and feel nothing at all.
My phone buzzes. Trina’s name on the screen.
Trina: You watching TV?
I’m not watching TV. I’m staring at congealed pasta and wondering when exactly my marriage became a performance I wasn’t invited to.
Me: No. Why?
Trina: Turn it on, channel 7. Now.
I should ignore it, go to bed, pull the covers over my head, deal with whatever fresh humiliation the universe has prepared for me in the morning. But my hand is already reaching for the remote, and the screen blinks to life before I can talk myself out of it.
The press conference replay. Pietro at the podium, confident and polished, the company logo bright behind him. And there she is. Giulietta Greyson, leaning into the microphone, her smile luminous.
The future of Marino Foods has always been about family. About building a legacy that lasts. We’re so excited to take that mission global.
The future tastes sweet. That’s what she’s really saying, dressed up in corporate gloss, but I’d know the bones of it anywhere.
That’s my line. My napkin. My stupid joke scrawled across a café table before I understood I was writing the thing our whole life would be built on.
Hearing it in her mouth is like watching a stranger walk down the street in a coat stolen off my back, and everyone stopping to tell her how well it suits her.
She’s wearing my words in that cream silk dress.
I turn up the volume.
A reporter asks about the company’s origin story. Pietro opens his mouth to answer, but Giulietta beats him to it.
Marino Foods started with a dream. A dream of bringing the honest flavors of an Italian kitchen to every table in the country, of proving that food made the old way could compete on any stage. That dream has driven every decision we’ve made, and it’s what drives this expansion today.
Flavor without meaning is only chemistry, she tells the cameras, leaning in as though she’s confiding in each viewer personally. The one thing no competitor can ever copy is genuine connection.
My hands go cold around the remote. I said those exact words to Pietro across a café table ten years ago, arguing with a stranger about what his family’s company was missing, and now they’re coming out of her mouth in my cadence, polished for television.
She speaks for three more minutes. About the company’s values, its mission, its vision for the future. She uses words I recognize, phrases I wrote in notebooks I thought no one ever read. She sounds passionate, articulate, proud.
She sounds like she built this. And the terrible thing, the thing that closes my throat, is that she’s good at it.
Word-perfect. She’s saying my sentences better than I ever said them out loud, to a room that believes every one, and some small traitor part of me understands exactly why he stopped correcting the record.
It’s easier this way. I’m easier to erase than to explain.
I watch Pietro’s face through the whole thing. He nods along, smiles at the right moments, looks at her with what I can only describe as admiration. He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t add that his wife wrote those values on a cocktail napkin before the company had a name.
Not once does he say my name. I keep waiting for it, the way you keep pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts.
One sentence. Her, my wife, none of this happens without her.
A few words and he could have handed me back to myself in front of the whole country.
He doesn’t. He just keeps nodding, warm and proud, at the woman wearing my life, and the silence where my name should be gets louder than anything either of them is saying.
The broadcast cuts to a detergent ad, bright and stupid, and I realize I’ve been holding the remote so hard the edges have printed red lines into my palm.
I set it down. My hands don’t feel like mine.
Somewhere across the city there’s a version of tonight where I’m standing at that podium in the deep blue dress still hanging in my closet, and he’s saying my name into the microphone, and the future really does taste sweet.
I sit very still on the couch and let that version die, quietly, the way I’ve let so many of them die.
My phone rings. The display shows my mother’s name, and for a moment I consider letting it go to voicemail. But Beatrice Sposito doesn’t leave voicemails. She leaves consequences.
“Hello, Ma.”
“I watched the news.” Her voice is cool, clipped. The voice she uses when she’s disappointed but too well-bred to say so directly. “Interesting broadcast.”
“I thought so too.”
“That woman. The blonde one.” A pause, deliberate. “She’s quite accomplished.”
“Apparently.”
“Ysabelle.” My mother’s tone sharpens. “You married above your station. We all knew it. Your father arranged that match because the Marino name could open doors the Sposito name couldn’t, and the Marinos wanted his supplier routes folded into theirs.
Everyone got what they bargained for. You were supposed to be grateful.
You were supposed to work to deserve it. ”
“And what exactly have I not worked hard enough at?”
“Keeping your husband’s attention, clearly.” The words land with surgical precision. “A woman who can’t hold onto what’s hers has no one to blame but herself. You need to fight for your position, or that Greyson woman is going to take it from you.”
“She’s his business partner, Ma. Not his mistress.”
“There’s always a line. And it always gets crossed.” Beatrice pauses. “Your grandmother knew how to hold onto a man. Your father’s wandering eye never got further than looking. You could learn from her example.”
“And while you’re learning, ask him about the deathbed promise.
” A pause, the kind she uses to enjoy herself.
“The Greyson girl’s mother, on her last day, made your husband swear to take care of her daughter.
Everyone in that family knows the story.
Everyone at the club knows it. I assumed you did too. ”
What the hell?
Everyone knew. Everyone at the club, the whole Greyson family, my own mother, all of them holding this one fact about my marriage that I was never handed.
Ten years I’ve slept beside that promise without a name for it, and I had to learn it tonight, secondhand, in the same breath my mother used to tell me I wasn’t trying hard enough.
The humiliation of it settles over the humiliation already there, layer on layer, until I can hardly feel where one ends.
I think of Nonna Fe, bent over her oven, teaching me ratios and patience and the stubborn faith that bread will rise if you do the work.
I don’t remember her teaching me how to cage a man who doesn’t want to be held.
“I need to go, Ma.”
“Fight for it, Ysabelle. Or you’ll end up with nothing.”
The line goes dead.
I set my phone down carefully, as though it might shatter if I move too fast. The TV is still on, now showing some late-night variety show, the hosts’ laughter grating against my nerves. I should turn it off and go upstairs, where the cold sheets of our bed are waiting.
Instead, I pick up my laptop.
The search results load quickly. Press coverage of today’s conference, photos and articles and social media posts all featuring the same images. Pietro and Giulietta at the podium, shaking hands with guests, smiling for the cameras, her hand on his arm with the ease of long familiarity.
One headline catches my eye. A tabloid site, the kind that trades in gossip and speculation.
MARINO’S SECRET SWEETHEART?
The photo underneath was taken tonight. Giulietta, laughing at a joke, her hand on Pietro’s chest. The angle makes them look intimate. Deliberate.
The article is speculation, probably baseless, and I should dismiss it with a scoff. But I can’t stop reading.
Sources close to the Marino family confirm that Giulietta Greyson has been a fixture in Pietro Marino’s life for years, with some insiders questioning whether the business relationship might be more personal than public appearances suggest.
“She’s always around,” one anonymous source reports. “At every meeting, every dinner, every event. His wife is never in the picture. You have to wonder.”
I close the laptop.
I don’t hear him come in. One moment I’m alone with the ruined table, and the next he’s in the doorway in his undershirt, tie gone, a glass of water in his hand, blinking at me as if he’d forgotten I lived here.
“You didn’t even call,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “You let me set this table. You let me bake. You let me sit here for four hours, waiting, and you didn’t even call.”
He sets the glass down slowly. “Ysabelle. It was the announcement. You know what today meant for-”
“I know exactly what today meant!” I’m on my feet before I decide to stand.
“It was ten years of us. And I found out you weren’t coming from a news alert, standing in our kitchen, watching another woman put her hand on your arm like she’s done it a thousand times.
I was waiting for you, Pietro, and you were with her! You’re always with her!”
“Giulietta is work.” He rubs a hand down his face. “That’s all she is. Don’t mix things up.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure that’s all you are for her. Are you really that naive?” I shake my head. “Everyone thinks she’s your mistress, you know?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It really isn’t. You’re always with her, and everyone notices. People have forgotten what your own wife looks like, Pietro. And sometimes, it seems as if you too forgot we’re married.”
He frowns. “I swear, she’s just work. If she ever tries something, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell her I don’t want her. I swear. But nothing has happened. They’re all just baseless rumors.”
“She said my words tonight.” The thing I swore I’d never say aloud comes loose anyway.
“On television, Pietro. The future tastes sweet. I wrote that for you on a napkin, in a café that doesn’t exist anymore, and I watched her say it into a microphone like it came out of her own head.
And you stood next to her and smiled and let her have it. ”
My voice breaks on the last word, and I hate it, hate that the tears choose now, in front of him, when I wanted to be made of stone.
“I don’t need the roses. I don’t need Rosetta.
I needed you to look at me and see a reason worth coming home to.
Just once. I needed to not be the least important thing on your calendar. ”
For one moment, one, I see the old guilt surface behind his eyes, and God help me, I still let myself hope.
Then his shoulders drop and his face goes tired and far away, and he says the worst possible thing in the gentlest possible voice.
“What do you want me to do? I came home. I’m standing right here.
I don’t know what else you want from me tonight. ”
And there it is. The whole marriage in a single sentence.
He was never cruel, and there was never another woman in our bed.
The truth was quieter and worse: a man who thinks coming home is the same as showing up, who can look at his wife crying at their anniversary table and can’t, for the life of him, imagine what more she could possibly need.
I should send him upstairs and hold on to the anger, because right now it’s the only thing keeping me upright.
But he doesn’t retreat this time. He closes the space between us, his hands come up to frame my face, and he rests his forehead against mine, and the fight drains out of me all at once, the way it always does, because underneath ten years of being let down there’s a wanting I’ve never once managed to switch off.
“I love you,” he starts, and the words die in his throat the way they always die. So he tells me the only way he still knows how.
His mouth finds mine and I let it. I hate that I let it.
His hands slide under the hem of my dress and I arch into them anyway, hating that too, hating that my body still answers his as though it never got the message the rest of me did.
He kisses me the way a man apologizes when he has run out of words, and I kiss him back with a question I already know the answer to.
We don’t make it up the stairs. He brings me down onto the couch, and I pull him closer, and for a little while the only language left between us is this one, the one we somehow never managed to ruin.
He moves as though he’s trying to win me back with his body alone.
I let him believe he can. When it breaks over me I turn my face into his neck so he won’t see that I’m crying, and I tell myself it’s only the release, and I know that it isn’t.
Afterward he holds me, and his mouth opens against my hair as though he might finally say it. I wait. I’ve been waiting ten years. Then his breath goes slow and even, and the moment slips past the way all of them slip past, and what he says into the dark is, “I have an early start tomorrow.”
“I know,” I say. And that’s all of it. That’s the sound a marriage makes when it runs out of road.
He kisses my temple and goes upstairs, and a minute later the shower starts, the water carrying down through the old pipes. He’s washing off the day. The presser, the interviews, the woman in cream silk who wore my words as though she’d written them. I don’t follow him up.
Instead I sit at the anniversary table I set this afternoon with such stupid, stubborn hope.
The roses have wilted. The candles are burned to stubs.
I pull the velvet box from my pocket, the one I’ve carried for days, and open the card inside, the one I started a year ago and never finished.
I never told you that I chose you too. Chose.
Past tense, as though the choosing is behind us, as though the decision got made ten years ago and now we’re only living with what it cost.
I take out a pen. My hand hovers over the card.
I never told you that I chose you too, but I did. I chose you every morning when I woke up beside you. I chose you every time I wrote a note you never read. I chose you when it would have been easier to leave. But I’m starting to wonder if you ever chose me back.
The pen stops.
I can’t finish it. Not tonight, maybe not ever.