15. Antonio
— ? —
Antonio
The fabric bolt is heavier than it looks.
I’m halfway up the narrow stairs to the storefront’s second level, arms wrapped around what feels like forty pounds of midnight-blue silk, when my foot catches on a loose board and I nearly go tumbling back down.
“Careful!” Cassandra’s voice floats up from below. “That fabric costs more than your car.”
“My car is a rental.”
“Then it costs more than your rental.”
I make it to the top of the stairs and deposit the bolt on the worktable she’s set up, breathing harder than I’d like to admit.
I’ve been helping at the atelier for a week now - carrying things, learning to use equipment, doing whatever she tells me to do - and it’s the hardest I’ve worked in years.
It’s also the happiest I’ve been in longer than I can remember.
“That’s the last one,” I call down. “What’s next?”
Cassandra appears at the top of the stairs, a measuring tape draped around her neck and pins bristling from a cushion on her wrist.
She’s wearing jeans and a loose blouse - the kind with a forgiving waistline that’s become her preference lately. Eight weeks along now, and though nothing’s visible yet, I can tell from the way she shifts her weight that her body is already changing in ways only she can feel.
“You can start unrolling the muslin on the cutting table. I need to mark pattern pieces.”
“How much muslin?”
“Three yards. There’s a ruler by the window.”
I find the ruler and start measuring, aware of her watching me from across the room.
We’ve developed a rhythm over the past week - she assigns tasks, I complete them, we talk about the work or the weather or anything except the enormous questions hanging between us.
It’s not reconciliation. It’s not even friendship, exactly.
But it’s something. A foundation we’re building one bolt of fabric at a time.
“You’re getting better at that,” she says.
“At measuring fabric?”
“At following instructions without trying to improve them.”
I laugh despite myself. “Is that a compliment?”
“It’s an observation. The Antonio I knew in Rome would have had seventeen suggestions for how to do this more efficiently by now.”
“Maybe I’ve learned that my suggestions aren’t always helpful.”
“Maybe you have.”
She crosses to the cutting table and starts laying out pattern pieces, her movements quick and confident.
This is her element - I can see it in the way she holds herself, the way her whole body relaxes when she’s working with fabric. The woman who sat invisible at industry dinners, who faded into the background of her own life, is nowhere to be found. This Cassandra commands the room.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Depends on what it is.”
“Where did you learn all this? The cutting, the pattern-making. You were a model, not a designer.”
“Models learn things.” She doesn’t look up from her work.
“You spend enough time in garments, you start noticing how they’re made.
And I had a mentor in LA - an older designer who took me under her wing.
She taught me the basics. The rest I learned from books and YouTube and making a lot of mistakes. ”
“You never told me that.”
“You never asked.”
The words sting, but she’s right. In six years of marriage, I never asked about her dreams beyond the ones we shared. I assumed that because she’d stopped modeling, she’d stopped wanting to create. I assumed that being my wife was enough.
It wasn’t. It was never going to be.
“I’m asking now,” I say.
She looks up, studying my face. “The atelier was always the goal. Even when I was walking runways, I knew I wanted to make clothes, not just wear them. But then I met you, and we got married, and the timing never seemed right. There was always something more important - your career, our move to Rome, the trying.” She pauses on that last word, her hands stilling on the fabric.
“I kept putting it off. Telling myself next year, or after the baby, or when things settled down. And then I realized things were never going to settle down unless I made them settle.”
“So you left.”
“So I left.”
We carry the muslin and patterns downstairs, setting them on the cutting table. The bell over the front door jingles, and we both turn toward the sound. Three teenagers - two girls and a boy - are hovering at the threshold, looking uncertain about whether they’re allowed to come in.
“Can I help you?” Cassandra calls.
The bolder of the two girls steps forward. “We saw - there was a man carrying things inside, and my friend said…” She stops, squinting at me. “Are you Antonio Guerriero?”
I straighten up from the cutting table, very aware that I’m standing in the middle of a half-finished atelier holding a pair of fabric scissors. Not exactly the image my publicist spent years cultivating.
“Guilty as charged.”
“Oh my god.” The girl turns to her friends, eyes wide. “It’s really him. I told you it was him!”
“What are you doing here?” the boy asks, looking genuinely confused. “In Calabria? In a sewing shop?”
“Helping out.” I gesture at Cassandra. “This is the owner’s project. I’m just the muscle.”
“You’re Antonio Guerriero,” the girl says again, like I might have forgotten. “You were in Shadows of Venice. And The Last Confession. My mom watches all your movies.”
“Tell your mom I said thank you.”
“Could we - would it be okay if we took a picture?”
I glance at Cassandra, who shrugs slightly. Your call.
“Sure,” I say. “But only if you promise to tell everyone that the best atelier in Calabria is opening soon.”
The teenagers cluster around me for a selfie, giggling and whispering to each other. Cassandra watches from behind the cutting table, her expression unreadable. When the kids finally leave - after extracting promises that I’ll visit their school if I’m ever in the area - she shakes her head slowly.
“That was surreal.”
“Welcome to my life.”
“Your life involves teenagers ambushing you in fabric shops?”
“My life involves being recognized everywhere I go. I’ve just gotten used to it.” I move back to the cutting table, picking up where I left off with the muslin. “Does it bother you?”
“The recognition?”
“The reminder of who I am. What I do.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “It used to. When we first got married, every time someone asked for your autograph, I felt like I was being erased. Like you were the real person and I was just… standing next to you.”
“And now?”
“Now I have a fabric shop full of my own projects, and you’re the one standing next to me.” She almost smiles. “It’s a different perspective.”
We work in comfortable silence for a while, the afternoon light streaming through the windows.
I’m learning to use the steamer - Cassandra showed me yesterday, with barely concealed amusement at my incompetence - and I practice on scraps of fabric while she cuts out pattern pieces with the kind of precision that makes my rough attempts look amateur.
“You’re getting better,” she says eventually.
“At steaming?”
“At all of it. The cutting. The measuring. Not looking like you want to run away every time I hand you a task.”
“I don’t want to run away.”
“You used to. Every time things got hard, you ran. To work, to the set, to anything that felt safer than whatever we were dealing with.”
I set down the steamer and turn to face her. “I know. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. But I’m trying to be different, Cass. I’m trying to be here even when it’s hard.”
“I know you are.” Her voice softens slightly. “I can see it.”
The moment stretches between us, fragile and tentative. I want to cross the room and hold her. I want to tell her everything I feel, everything I’ve been holding back for weeks. But we have boundaries now - boundaries I promised to respect - and I’m not going to be the one who breaks them.
“The interview with Bianca is airing today,” she says, breaking the spell.
My stomach drops. “What?”
“The victim interview. I saw it advertised on the news this morning.” She gestures toward the small television in the corner, the one she keeps on for background noise while she works. “It starts in ten minutes, if you want to see what she has to say.”
I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to hear whatever version of events Bianca has constructed, whatever narrative she’s spinning to make herself the victim and Cassandra the villain. But I know I need to. We both do.
“Turn it on.”
Cassandra finds the remote and switches to the entertainment channel. A commercial is playing - something bright and cheerful, completely at odds with the dread building in my chest.
“You don’t have to watch this,” I say.
“Yes, I do. Whatever she says, I need to know.”
The commercial ends. The interview begins.
Bianca is sitting in a tasteful living room, dressed in soft colors, her makeup minimal and her expression wounded. The interviewer - a woman I vaguely recognize from one of the morning shows - leans forward with practiced concern.
“Thank you for agreeing to talk to us, Bianca. I know this has been a difficult time.”
“It has.” Bianca’s voice is perfectly modulated, catching slightly on the words.
“I’ve been trying to understand what happened, but it still doesn’t make sense to me.
One moment I was working with a colleague, trying to help him through a difficult time, and the next I was being blamed for… things I never did.”
“You’re referring to the rumors about your relationship with Antonio Guerriero.”
“Rumors that were completely unfounded.” Bianca shakes her head, looking pained.
“Antonio and I were colleagues. Friends, yes, but nothing more. I don’t know where these stories came from, but they destroyed my reputation and ended my relationship with a man I cared about deeply - as a friend. Nothing more.”
I feel Cassandra stiffen beside me.
“What about his wife?” the interviewer asks. “Cassandra Guerriero. There are reports that she accused you of having an affair.”
Bianca’s expression shifts - still sympathetic, but with an edge underneath. “I don’t want to speak badly of Cassandra. She’s clearly going through something. But the accusations she made… they were based on nothing. On jealousy, maybe. On a marriage that was already struggling.”
The interviewer is repeating an allegation Cassandra never made. And Bianca is confirming it as though it’s fact. The publicity camp planted this - the jealous wife narrative, ready-made for sympathetic denial. I can’t prove it, but the shape of it is unmistakable.
“You’re saying she was jealous of you?”
“I’m saying she saw what she wanted to see.” Bianca sighs delicately. “A wife whose husband is never home, whose marriage is falling apart - I understand why she might need someone to blame. But I wasn’t the problem in their relationship. I was just convenient.”
The interview continues, but I’ve stopped listening. My hands are clenched at my sides, and there’s a roaring in my ears that has nothing to do with the television.
Jealous. Unstable. Seeing things that weren’t there.
She’s rewriting history. She’s painting Cassandra as the villain - the crazy wife who destroyed a friendship, an innocent woman’s career, because she couldn’t accept that her husband didn’t love her anymore.
I turn to Cassandra. She’s staring at the screen, her face completely blank.
“Turn it off,” I say.
She doesn’t move.
“Cass. Turn it off.”
“She’s calling me jealous,” Cassandra says quietly. “She’s telling the entire country that I was the problem. That I made it all up because I was insecure.”
“It’s not true.”
“I know it’s not true. But everyone watching doesn’t know that.” She finally looks away from the screen, meeting my eyes. “This is what I’m going to be dealing with, isn’t it? For the rest of my life. The crazy wife who couldn’t accept reality.”
“No.” The word comes out fierce, certain. “No, Cass. This isn’t how it ends. She doesn’t get to tell this story.”
“How do we stop her?”
I don’t have an answer. Not yet. But as Bianca continues her performance on the screen - weeping delicately about friendships destroyed and reputations ruined - I know one thing with absolute certainty.
This isn’t over.