9. Cassandra
— ? —
Cassandra
The studio lot is quieter than I expected at this hour.
I pull up to the security gate and give my name, and the guard checks his list and waves me through with a polite smile. Visitor parking is around the back, he says. Someone from production will meet me at the main entrance.
No one meets me at the main entrance.
I wait for ten minutes, checking my phone, watching crew members drift past in small groups. Finally, I approach a woman with a headset who looks like she might know something.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Antonio Guerriero. I’m his wife.”
“Oh!” Her expression shifts - surprise, recognition, a flicker of something I can’t read. “He’s in his dressing room. Building C, down the main corridor, last door on the left.”
“Thank you.”
The walk to Building C feels longer than it should.
I pass through corridors lined with equipment and half-dressed sets, the behind-the-scenes machinery of filmmaking that I’ve never quite gotten used to.
A documentary crew is packing up nearby, coiling cables and breaking down cameras, and I wonder vaguely what they’re filming.
The main corridor of Building C is empty except for a few crew members checking their phones.
I spot the dressing room door at the end - Antonio’s name on a placard beside it - and I feel my heartbeat quicken.
He asked me to come. He’s sick, and he asked for me, and maybe this is the start of something different.
I knock once, lightly, and when there’s no answer, I push the door open.
The room is dim. Soft lighting, the kind that’s meant to be flattering for costume checks and camera tests. And in the center of it, on the small sofa that takes up most of the space, is my husband.
He’s lying down, his head in Bianca Fioravanti’s lap.
She’s stroking his hair.
For a moment I can’t breathe. The scene in front of me doesn’t compute - it’s too intimate, too tender, the kind of image that belongs in a bedroom between people who have the right to touch each other like that.
Antonio’s eyes are closed. His face is flushed with fever. And Bianca is looking down at him with an expression of such careful concern that something in my chest cracks clean in half.
“Oh.” Bianca looks up, and her face cycles through surprise into something else - something almost like satisfaction, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it. “Cassandra. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“What is this?”
“He collapsed after the wrap meeting.” Her hand is still in his hair, still stroking. “I’ve been trying to keep his fever down. He’s been asking for you.”
“Then why are you the one touching him?”
“Someone had to.” Her voice is gentle, reasonable, the voice of a woman who’s only trying to help. “He was in bad shape. I couldn’t just leave him alone.”
Antonio stirs at the sound of voices, his eyes fluttering open. “Cass?”
“I’m here.”
“I didn’t - I don’t remember…” He tries to sit up and Bianca helps him, her hand on his shoulder, her body angled toward him in a way that makes me want to scream.
“You sent me a text,” I say. “Saying you were sick. Asking me to come.”
“I didn’t send…” He stops. Confusion crosses his face. “My phone. Someone had my phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yesterday - in the dressing room. Before the wrap meeting. I left my phone unlocked and someone…” He’s struggling, the fever clearly affecting his ability to think. “And then again today. After I sent you the cancellation text. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Bianca stands, smoothing her clothes, and the movement draws my attention to the careful arrangement of the scene - the dim lighting, the intimate positioning, the way everything is staged to look like something it probably isn’t.
Probably.
That word is doing a lot of work right now.
“I should go,” Bianca says. “Now that you’re here to take care of him.”
She walks past me toward the door, and as she does, she pauses just long enough to murmur: “He’s been working so hard. I worry about him. We all do.”
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with my husband in a room that still smells like her perfume.
“Cass.” Antonio is struggling to stand, one hand braced on the arm of the sofa. “Cass, I didn’t - whatever you’re thinking, it’s not…”
“What am I thinking, Antonio?”
“I don’t know. But I can see it on your face, and I need you to believe me. I didn’t ask her to be here. I didn’t send you that text. I’ve been in meetings all day and then I was in the corridor and my phone was in my dressing room and…”
“And she just happened to be here? Playing nursemaid? With your head in her lap?”
“I don’t know how that happened. I must have passed out. The fever…”
“She knew you were sick.” The words come out flat, cold, nothing like the screaming I feel building in my chest. “She knew you had a fever. She knew you’d collapsed.
And I didn’t know any of that, Antonio. Your wife.
The person who’s supposed to know when you’re unwell, when you need help, when you need someone to take care of you. ”
“I didn’t tell her…”
“You didn’t have to. She already knew.” I step back, putting distance between us. “How was she the one here taking care of you while I was at home waiting for you to turn up? How do I keep finding out what’s happening in your life after she’s already part of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know it’s not.” He’s on his feet now, swaying slightly, and I can see how sick he really is - the gray pallor of his skin, the glassy sheen of his eyes, the way his hands shake when he reaches for me.
“But I’m telling you the truth. There’s nothing going on with Bianca.
There never has been. Whatever you saw when you walked in… ”
“What I saw was another woman caring for my husband. What I saw was intimacy that should belong to me. What I saw was the thing everyone’s been telling me for months, the thing I refused to believe because I trusted you.”
“You can still trust me.”
“Can I?” I shake my head, and something in me hardens. “She knew you were sick, Antonio. She knew before I did. She was here taking care of you, and I didn’t even know you were unwell until that text. If you didn’t send it, did she?”
“She sent - you think she…”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know what’s real and what’s performance and where the line is between your work and your life. But I know what I saw. And I know how it made me feel.”
“How?” His voice cracks. “Tell me how it made you feel.”
“Replaced.”
The word lands between us like a stone.
“Not cheated on,” I continue, “because I don’t think you’ve touched her. Not yet. But replaced. In the small daily knowing of you. In the right to be the person who takes care of you when you’re sick. In the place that was supposed to be mine.”
“Cass…”
“I’m done.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m filing for divorce.”
The words come out steadier than I feel. I watch them hit him, watch his face crumble, watch him reach for me and then stop himself.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” I step toward the door. “I’ll stay with my parents in Calabria while the paperwork goes through. I’ll have someone come for my things.”
“Cass, please. Please don’t do this. Let me explain…”
“You’ve been explaining for months. You’ve been promising and apologizing and asking for more time. I’m out of time, Antonio. I’m out of faith.”
“I love you.”
“Maybe you do.” I pull open the door. “But love isn’t enough. Not anymore.”
I walk out of the dressing room and through the corridor and past the documentary crew still packing their equipment. I don’t look back. I don’t stop. I keep walking until I reach my car, and then I sit behind the wheel and let myself shake apart for exactly sixty seconds before I start the engine.
Calabria is a five-hour drive.
I’ll be there by morning.