3. Elysa
THREE
Elysa
A fter I handed him the divorce papers, it took Dante one week to contact me.
Okay, so I’d hoped he’d come chasing after me and say, “ Elysa, come back to me. I love you .” That we’d have a Heathcliff and Catherine moment from Wuthering Heights .
Instead, he texted me.
Dante: Elysa, will you be joining me for the Carrera Charity event?
Me: No.
Dante: Why?
Me: We’re getting a divorce.
Dante: But we’re not divorced .
Me: Take Lucia.
He called then.
“ Cara —”
“Is cara like baby? So, you don’t have to remember the name of the woman you’re rolling off of?” I didn’t expect the snark to pour out of me like that.
I surprised myself.
I had asked for a divorce, and now I told Dante he was a bit of a manwhore…
now, anything could happen.
“No, it’s not.”
“You call Lucia cara . I’ve heard you.”
“ Cara is just darling, and I use it?—”
“With women, you work with or women you think will make a good wife?”
“Elysa, cara ?—”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped.
“Fine, what do you want me to call you? Mia leoncina ?”
My Little Lioness was better than little bitch!
“Call me Elysa. I have a perfectly good name.”
I heard a long, suffering sigh.
“ Elysa , why are you being difficult?”
“I’m being me.” Not true.
This wasn’t me.
I had no idea who this was.
She had my voice and body, but her attitude was to take no prisoners when I usually was the prisoner.
“I would like for you to attend the charity gala with me,” he tried again.
“And I’d like to have dinner with Michelangelo, but life’s full of letdowns."
“Elysa,” he growled. Yeah, like he was a wolf or…a dog?
“Dante,” I growled right back. My growl was more ladylike…at least, I hoped it was .
Another long sigh. “You’re driving me?—”
“Have you taken a look at the divorce papers? I’d like to get this over with ASAP.”
I hated my life right now.
Why couldn’t Dante have fallen for me even a little bit? Just a teeny tiny bit so we could make it work.
I’d fallen in love with him while he was being an asshole. I’d been an angel to him, and he thought Lucia was superior wife material? Son of a bitch! Everyone knew you didn’t fuck an ex—it never went well.
Words for the wise, Elysa, because now Dante is your ex, and no way should you have sex with him.
But I wanted to—more than that, I wanted to go for our walks in the evenings, even though he was grouchy most of the time. I wanted to have dinner with him even though he complained about the food.
“What is this?”
“Brisket. You don’t like it?”
“It’s fine, it’s…just very oily.”
“It’s brisket,” I said baffled. This was a world traveler who ate in the best restaurants in the world, hell he owned the best restaurants as they were in his hotels, and he had a problem with authentic New York cuisine.
“It’s fine, Elysa. Just sit so we can eat. I have calls with Japan later in the evening.”
So, that’s how the marriage went. I kept working hard to make it work, and he kept doing whatever he wanted, which now I realized was pushing me away.
“The lawyers are looking through the documents. We can’t just divorce in Rome, you understand?” He used that condescending tone, the one where he made me feel small. I closed my eyes for a moment, surrendering to exhaustion. It was taking too much energy to behave like this woman who I wished I was—the one with the spine of steel and kick-you-in-your-balls attitude.
“It takes six months, Dante,” I said wearily. Carmen DeLuca, Maura’s aunt, had told me that.
“That’s for un divorzio consensuale ,” he drawled. “For divorzio giudiziale , it can take…I don’t know, anywhere from a year to two, sometimes three…more.”
My heart sank like a stone tossed into the Hudson—heavy, fast, and gone before I could stop it. “We’re having a consensual divorce, aren’t we, Dante?”
He paused for what seemed like an eternity. I closed my eyes and felt a hand on my shoulder. Maura looked at me with concern. I shook my head.
“Depends. Are you coming for the charity gala?”
The nerve!
“Are you blackmailing me to come to a freakin’ party with you?”
I couldn’t believe it. Dante Giordano had lost his ever-loving mind.
“The Carrera family is important in Rome and for the Giordano Hotel Group. And Renzo Carrera, as you know, was a good friend of Nonno, and I’m not ready to sink my business relationship with him because you’re having a…how do you call it…yes, snit. ”
I wanted to throw my iPhone against a wall.
I wanted to throw Dante against a wall.
I wanted to yell at my Nonno for making that stupid promise to Don Giordano. But both old men were dead, so I had no one to take my anger out on…well, except Dante, who was a fucking asshole.
“Don Carrera is a reasonable man, and if you tell him?—”
“Renzo is a lot of things, reasonable , he is not. Cristina Carrera personally called me and asked me to make sure you’ll be there. Apparently, you did some charity thing with her, and she’s very impressed.” He sounded bored and angry. How did a man manage to be both at the same time? Well, Dante had mad skills when it came to contradictory emotions.
Maura sat down next to me on her couch and took my free hand in hers. Her kindness and generosity warmed my heart.
I’d met Maura when I came to Rome before Dante and I married. I’d gone for a long walk and ended up in her bistro, and we started talking. I asked her about the sign on her door: Cercasi Personale – Unisciti A Noi!
My Italian was not great, but I knew a help wanted sign when I saw it.
Maura, a fellow American, gave me a job right away even though I didn’t speak Italian fluently. She didn’t think that would be a problem and thought instead it would help me learn the language faster, which it did. Now, I could comfortably hold a conversation in Italian. I could understand what people were saying if they weren’t talking at the speed of light.
“I didn’t do much. Maura and I just catered an event for the women’s shelter for free,” I told him.
“Be here by four. Patrizia will be there to get you ready.”
Patrizia was the stylist he hired, and she hated me. She kept saying how I wasn’t suitable to be Dante’s wife. She said it in Italian, but I understood the bitch just fine. She was all smiles in English, though.
“I can get ready on my own,” I muttered.
What? Was I just giving in and going to this stupid charity gala?
“No, you can’t, and you know it,” he continued smoothly.
There he went again, telling me that I didn’t know how to look like a Giordano, that I couldn’t do basic shit like put on an outfit and makeup because I was just so middle-class in New York.
“I don’t want to deal with Patrizia.”
“Why?” he asked. His confusion was genuine.
"Because last time, she said to her assistant how my tits were too big, that I looked like a milking cow, and my thighs were too fat, and that you must’ve been out of your mind to marry a fat cow like me—a mucca grassa ."
Even now, those words hurt. I was never skinny, but I didn’t care. I liked my body. I had curves. Not Kim Kardashian curves (but who did), but J-Lo’ish ones. I had a big booty and nice tits. I was a woman, not some half-starved woman trying to have the body of a twelve-year-old.
“She said what ?” Dante roared.
“You heard me. I don’t want to see her. I’ll figure it out.” How, pray, would I do that? I left all those fancy clothes at his flat. Damn it, I’d have to go back and…what? These were people who thought “repeat” was a thing you didn’t do with clothes. I always repeated—because I was a regular person.
“Okay, I’ll get someone else who knows how to treat you properly,” he decreed like he was King of the World, which I guess he was.
“No, I?—”
“I can keep the proceedings going so you don’t get your precious divorce for years,” he cut me off.
“Why? Won’t that be a problem for your plans to fuck Lucia?”
“You said I didn’t have to wait for a divorce to do that.”
Apparently, the heart could break after it was already broken.
“I have to go, Dante,” I said quietly, feeling forlorn and so damn alone.
I’d thought that I’d have a family now with Dante and Don Giordano. I knew my father didn’t care much about me except to keep him in the good graces of Dante’s Nonno. My mother—bless her God-loving heart—thought I was a slut and a whore and didn’t want to have anything to do with me until she needed money, when she demanded I send her some, which I always did. It was just money. I could always earn more.
Don Giordano was so loving that he filled all my empty places that craved family—but Dante emptied those spaces just as efficiently, so I felt alone and lonely. Now, Don Giordano was gone, and the ache in my heart was massive.
I didn’t have many friends, even in New York. I was an introvert. I preferred my own company. I liked working at restaurants and managing wine programs, which had been a point of contention with my mother, who thought all alcohol was the work of the devil. I enjoyed talking to people for work but after, I wanted quiet…with my husband who didn’t want to be my husband. My life was a shitshow!
“Four in the evening on Saturday, Elysa. Don’t be late.” He hung up, and I dropped my phone on my lap.
“What’s going on?” Maura asked.
I groaned, burying my face in my hands.
Maura and I looked like opposites.
My hair was dark, my skin was olive, my eyes dark brown, I was just around five feet four inches, and my body was fit (because I ran) but not slender…at all.
Maura was blonde, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, tall, and looked like a supermodel. She was a trained chef, and when she came to Rome to visit her aunt, she met and fell in love with Roberto, who turned out to be a jackass. She ended up staying in Rome to nurse her broken heart and ultimately decided not to leave. Her father had a lot of money, and he’d helped her open her bistro.
What had started as me being a server had evolved within months once Maura saw my skill with wine. I now managed her wine program at the bistro, the wine sellers, and the front-of-the-house.
I loved my job.
Maura treated me like a partner, not an employee, and paid me accordingly. I earned a percentage of the profits, and we’d done incredibly well since we started working together.
I had also taken over marketing, using the skills I’d gained in hospitality school to improve our search engine optimization, land the bistro on "top places to eat" lists published by influencers and manage our growing social media presence and newsletter. Our clientele was about seventy percent locals and thirty percent tourists, which meant we thrived even during the off-season.
The fact that Dante had looked down upon my job at the bistro when he spoke to his friend had hurt a lot. I’d made something here and he’d not even bothered to come to the bistro to have a meal. Whenever we went out, it was because a social event required us to; otherwise, we ate at home or went to a restaurant in one of the Giordano hotels, where the cheapest main course was priced at a hundred euros .
There had been so many red flags while we were married, but I ignored them because I was going to make this marriage work, come hell or high water.
I didn’t meet his friends. He was gone a lot, which had been fine because I worked a lot. Still, I was home every evening, just in case he was there, like a puppy waiting for its master.
We closed the bistro on Mondays and Tuesdays, but I only took Mondays off and worked on Tuesdays on all the things that needed to get done on the marketing and paperwork end of things.
Dante thought I was a server—and so what if I was? It was honest work; how dare he compare that to the brilliant Lucia?
“He wants me to attend a charity something with him…it’s something Cristina Carrera is throwing and….” I shook my head. “He said he’ll contest the divorce if I don’t attend, Maura.”
I couldn’t afford that. Sure, Maura’s aunt helped me out, but she’d charged me for her work. I’d insisted. I couldn’t expect her to spend hours and hours fighting Dante’s lawyers and not get paid for it if it came to that—which I hoped it wouldn’t.
“Why would he do that? I thought he wanted a divorce.” Maura was as baffled as I was.
“Renzo Carrera was a good friend of Dante Senior,” I explained.
Maura made a face. “Ah, and if he found out that you’re divorcing Dante right after his friend’s death it’ll make Dante look bad.”
And if that wasn’t the saddest thing I’d heard in a long time! My husband tolerated me on his arm to maintain his business relationship with another family.
“Eventually, everyone will find out we’re divorced, so I don’t understand why we have to pretend now,” I said sullenly.
I didn’t want to go to a party with Dante because she’d be there.
When I looked back, I winced at how Lucia would monopolize discussions with Dante while I was there, and I’d think they were talking business and make myself scarce. I was now realizing that they were in a relationship of some kind. Sure, he hadn’t physically cheated on me, but I’d bet the bistro that he and Lucia had talked about getting rid of me so they could be together.
It wasn’t a stretch.
Lucia didn’t like me. I stayed away from her because the feeling was mutual. The times we had talked, she’d been dismissive and had looked down her patrician nose at me. She wasn’t the only person in Dante’s circle to do that—but I hadn’t cared as I’d been protected while Don Giordano was alive, but now, I’d be thrown to the wolves. Dante wasn’t going to tell anyone off.
Sure, he’d been shocked that Patrizia had been so blatant and stupid, thinking I didn’t understand Italian— and a part of me liked the idea that she’d lose the Giordano business. Serves her right!
“It’s just a party.” Maura patted my hand. “Just show your face and get out of there as soon as you can. Say you’re not feeling well or something.”
I groaned. “I did that once, remember? Next thing I knew, everyone wanted to know if I was pregnant.”
Maura chuckled. “Sometimes I get the feeling that we Italians just aren’t as progressive as we should be. A woman has nausea or a headache, we decide she’s pregnant. Man is irritated with his wife in public, he has a mistress.”
“My husband works with his mistress and sees her more often than he did me.”
“Hey, it’s his loss.”
I shook my head. “It’s a nice platitude, Maura, but the loss is mine. I fell in love with him. I’m still in love with him, which is why he can still hurt me. He got everything he wanted, which is highly unfair. He isn’t hurting. He’s thinking about how to use me.”
“You know he’s ruthless when it comes to his business,” Maura reminded me.
“There’s knowing it, and then there’s experiencing it like this.”
“This too shall pass, darling.” Maura kissed my cheek.
“You mean like a kidney stone?”
Maura laughed.
I grinned in self-deprecation. “Yeah, I guess it’s going to hurt like a bitch.”