Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUCY
Idon’t call Alessio the next day or the day after that.
I pace my apartment like a caged animal, pausing only to check my phone, which sits untouched on the coffee table, screen black and waiting for me to make the call I’m dying to make.
I imagine him on the other side of the city, busy with whatever mafia lords do in daylight hours—oil-slick meetings, surveillance footage, a body or two neatly erased—and it stings to realize I picture him stalking me, not the other way around.
When I finally get a text, it's not from Alessio.
Vittoria: Please say ur alive, the muslin is fighting me xx
I smile despite myself. Vittoria is the only other person I can stand to be around lately, not because she understands, but because she doesn’t ask questions she knows I won't answer. In the weeks since our final for the Parsons MFA program, we’ve folded ourselves into a parallel existence at her family’s atelier, a warehouse in the Garment District stacked to the ceiling with bolts of tulle and the promise of ruinous allergic reactions.
When I step inside the next morning, the heat nearly knocks me flat.
The old iron radiators at the edges of the fitting room are all dialed to some hellish "ON" setting no one knows how to change.
Vittoria perches on a rolling chair behind an industrial sewing machine, one sandaled foot flexed on the pedal, her hair up in a clip like an orchid dying on a windowsill.
She looks me over, and her face goes sly.
“You look like you haven’t slept. Is this a hangover, or is it the Sicilian?
” Her accent sharpens the last word, as if it means something other than what it sounds like.
I busy myself taking the muslin from her hands, letting the stiff fabric cut crescents into my arms.
“I’m not hungover,” I say. “And he’s Calabrian, technically. Not that it matters.”
Vittoria smirks. “They always say it doesn’t matter, but it always does.”
We work in silence for a while, hands moving in practiced choreography.
My mind tries to focus on the shape of the dress, the delicate gathering of the sleeves, the micropleats across the bodice that are driving me insane.
I recall an art history lecture at Barnard—how the sculptors spent months obsessing over the folds of Athena’s robes and considered a single pleat the difference between genius and failure.
I want to make something that will outlast me.
I want to leave a mark that isn’t a bruise.
But all I can think about is the last time I saw Alessio, the way he pressed me into the mattress and told me I was his. The thought is volcanic, creeping under my skin and pooling in every place I wish could forget him.
Vittoria finally snorts. “You know, you do this thing—where it looks like you’re here, but in your head you’re somewhere else. Usually, when you’re thinking about design. Now, I think you’re thinking about dick.”
I nearly drop my pins. “Can you not say ‘dick’ before 11 a.m.?” I look away, cheeks hot.
“Fine,” she says, grinning. “But you should know it’s the word my nonna used in front of the pope.
You want me to use the Latin?” She taps her phone and scrolls to an email.
“Anyway, the client moved her fitting to Friday. You should come to dinner after, my brothers will be there. If you bring your guy, he can spar with them, and you can watch with popcorn.”
I snip a loose thread, pretending to deliberate. “He’s not really a dinner person.”
“Oh, he’s a cannibal then?” Vittoria’s teeth flash in a grin. “God. Why did you fall for a man with—how do you say?—an aura of disaster. I thought you liked them gentle.”
I think about that for a second. I have dated gentlemen.
I have sat across from earnest Yale grads over $8 cappuccinos and watched them try to domesticate me into Mrs. So-and-So while I mentally organized my escape routes.
I tried to let them touch me, but their hands felt like damp bread dough, their fingers trembling with the terror of offending.
I let them take me out to dinners where they spent more time talking to the waiter than to me.
Alessio’s hands don’t tremble, not ever; when he looks at me, it’s like there’s no one else in the world worth looking at.
“I guess I’m not into gentle anymore,” I say. I don’t mean for my voice to sound so hollow.
Vittoria swings her chair around to face me. “You want to talk about it?”
I don’t, but I do. I want to spill everything, let it tumble out in ugly shreds, and have someone tell me I’m not a monster for wanting something I can’t name. Instead, I say, “Is it bad to want to be wanted the way he wants me?”
She considers this, lips pursed. “No,” she says. “But you'd better make sure the man doing the wanting doesn’t eat you alive. My cousin married a man who thought he owned her. She used to run marathons. Now she’s not allowed to wear shorts.”
It’s meant as a joke—Vittoria never stays heavy for long—but I hear the warning anyway. If Alessio had his way, I’d be locked in a climate-controlled display case, model number one of his strange, glass-box world.
I pin a dart at the bust, knuckles white. “Sometimes I think I'm not afraid to disappear, as long as it’s on my own terms.”
Vittoria nods, slow and knowing. “Then you'd better make your terms very clear.”
By the time I finish at the studio, my skin smells like steaming polyester and boiled coffee. I’m half-tempted to go to Alessio’s, to let him wrap me up in that sick cocoon of safety and danger, but I force my feet homeward instead.
I step into the foyer of my grandmother's old apartment, a small but elegant one-bedroom on the Upper West Side that's been in the family since the 1970s.
The parquet floors still gleam despite their age, and the crown molding catches afternoon light in a way that almost makes me forget the broken elevator.
When I push open the living room door, my mother sits perched on the cream brocade sofa—the one piece I couldn't bear to replace—arms folded across her vulture chest, as if the world were a particularly malicious legal document and she had just discovered a typo.
She stands. “Lucinda.”
I dump my bag on the floor. “I’m pretty sure you don’t have a key to my apartment.”
She lifts her chin. “Mrs. Astor-Wallace on the board let me in. He’s a friend of the family.”
I stare at her. “You’re trespassing.”
She ignores this. “I ran into Gregory Waters at Tavistock Grill. He said he saw you leaving your coffee date with Alessio Morrone.” Her gaze is a blue flame, cold and bright. “The Morrone family is poison, Lucy. Why am I hearing about this from him and not my own daughter?”
I cross the room to the kitchen, pulling a bottle of mineral water from the fridge. Hands shaking, I twist the cap and take a long pull before answering. “Because I don’t tell you everything anymore, mother. Sorry if that distresses you. And I knew this would be your reaction.”
She follows, staccato heels sharp on the tile. “You’re being flippant, which means you’re hiding something. Deception does not look good on you, Lucy. You have a responsibility to your family. We’ve given you everything. Please, don’t embarrass us by slumming with criminals.”
“Don’t talk like that–it’s offensive. I’m not discussing my personal life with you.”
She arches a perfect brow. “Alessio Morrone is dangerous. He’s been under investigation by the DA’s office for over a decade. He’s also forty-six, Lucy—he’s twice your age.”
I want to laugh, but I don’t. If I start, I won’t stop. “I don’t love him, mother,” I say it quietly, hoping she won’t detect my lies. “This isn’t ‘eternity and diamonds.’ It’s nothing.”
She softens then, which is somehow worse.
“You’re not nothing, Lucy. You’re a Stuyvesant, and a Livingston.
I know that means less to you than it does to us, but you have to be careful with men like that.
They’re criminals and trash who use women like you to legitimize their inferior name and strengthen their bloodlines. He’s using you.”
I cringe. I’ve always known she’s an unrepentant snob, but this is far worse than I expected.
“I know what I’m doing,” I say, except I don’t, and she must see it. “And I don’t share your insane values–or whatever you call your outdated point of view.”
She leans in and kisses me on the forehead, her palm cold against my cheek.
“You always think you know better than your family. That’s why I worry.
I want you to come to dinner tomorrow night.
Your father wants to talk to you. He has concerns.
” She lets herself out, shutting the door so gently I almost think I imagined the whole visit.
I stand in my empty apartment, vibrating with anger and secrets. I make it to the bathroom and turn the shower on as hot as it’ll go. I sit on the toilet lid, letting the steam fill the air until my lungs hurt. I don’t cry, but I want to.
For a moment, I picture what would happen if Alessio just stopped calling. Would I let my heart break, or would I patch up the hollow and fill it with the next disaster? Would I move on, get bored, find someone safe and gentle, and hate him for not being enough?
I look at myself in the mirror, eyes raw. There are faint bruises on my collarbones—his hands, his mouth. I touch them, tracing the pattern like I’m deciphering a map to a place I don’t want to visit, but probably will.
I turn up the water and scrub myself red. But when I step out and wrap up in a towel, the bruises remain.
Work is always a good idea. Men have a tendency to drive you off track. My ambitions are important, and I can’t allow this sudden infatuation distract me from my future as the future Vera Wang.
Vittoria’s client is a stick-thin influencer with a last name that’s been a byline in Architectural Digest since the ‘80s. She floats into the atelier on a cloud of Chanel No. 5 and entitlement, her hair wound into a bun so tight it gives me a migraine just looking at it.
Vittoria is sweetness itself: “You look incredible,” “The silk lights up your eyes, darling,” “Let’s do a little walk, see how it flows.
” All I can think about is how this woman will get married once and divorced twice before thirty, and how I’m expected to make her look like a Renaissance painting for someone who won’t remember her middle name in five years.
The fitting goes to hell in fifteen minutes.
The client snags a pin and shrieks like she’s been stabbed with a steak knife.
She demands a photo on her iPhone so she can “send it to the stylist,” then air-drops it to the stylist and immediately demands a different neckline.
In the end, she leaves, promising to text feedback, which means she’ll be back next week with an entirely new set of requests.
We collapse onto the muslin-stained floor after she leaves. Vittoria’s face is damp with sweat, mascara smudged to her cheekbones.
“She’s going to want something already in Vogue,” she says, fanning herself with a scrap of bridal lace. “All that talk of an ‘original’ gown—what a load of shit.”
I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
Vittoria side-glances me. “You want to get dinner?”
I shake my head. “I have to fix the bodice, and then go to my parents’ place for dinner. They’re expecting me and ready to learn why I’ve been spotted with a gangster.”
She chews her lip. “Lucy. You can talk to me. About anything, not just the work."
I thread a needle, watching how the light slicks across the steel. “What would you do if someone offered you everything you ever wanted—but you could never leave?”
She considers. “Once, I wanted to be a ballerina more than anything. When I was eight, I got a full scholarship. My mother cried for weeks—she said it was a curse, that I’d break my body before I turned twenty.
But it was the only thing that ever made me want to wake up in the morning.
” She cocks her head. “If someone said I could have it, but I’d be a prisoner?
I think I’d have taken it and called it freedom anyway. ”
Her words settle in my chest, hot and heavy. “What happened?”
She grins, a wolfish little flash. “My feet got ugly, and I got hungry, so I quit. But sometimes I regret it. Maybe you should think about it for a while longer. Don’t live with regrets, no matter how small they might be.”