Chapter 18 Alessandro
ALESSANDRO
“You’ve been picking at your food for the last ten minutes.”
Bianca looks up from her barely-touched breakfast, dark circles under her eyes suggesting she didn’t sleep well.
It’s been nearly a week since her successful interrogation trial, and while she’s been riding the high of her newfound abilities, I can see something else eating at her.
“I’m fine,” she says, but her voice lacks conviction as she shoves some scrambled eggs toward the edge of her plate.
I nearly snort. Does she really think she can lie to me of all people?
“You’ve been staring at your phone for the past hour like you want to call someone but can’t bring yourself to do it.” I set down my coffee and study her face. “Want to talk about it?”
She fiddles with her toast, tearing the bread into bite-sized pieces, avoiding eye contact. “I keep,” she hesitates, biting her lower lip. “I keep thinking about that dinner. About how I treated Bella and the twins.”
Ah, there it is. Our good old friend guilt rearing its ugly head.
“Arianna asked me to play,” she continues quietly.
“She’s eighteen months old, Alessandro. She doesn’t understand family politics or lies or any of this bullshit.
She just wanted her big sister to play with her, and I-I was so fucking cold to her.
” She drops her fork, clutching the edge of the table.
“You were angry at Matteo,” I point out.
“I was cruel to innocent children because I was angry at their father.” She finally looks up at me, and the pain in her eyes is raw. “What kind of person does that make me?”
Shit. I can see where this line of thinking is taking her. “The kind who’s human enough to feel guilty about it afterward,” I remark as I pick up my coffee mug and take a sip.
Bianca scoffs. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” She stands abruptly, pacing to the window.
I watch as the morning sun streams, bathing her in light. “Giovanni looked so confused when I wouldn’t talk to him properly. And Bella… God, Bella’s never done anything but try to be a good stepmother to me.”
I watch her struggle with this, recognizing the internal war between her anger at Matteo and her conscience about collateral damage.
“So what are you going to do about it?” I ask. While I understand that she may be feeling guilty, I don’t understand dwelling on it. If Bianca feels a certain way, she needs to take action.
“I don’t know.” She wraps her arms around herself, suddenly looking very young. “I can’t just go back and pretend nothing happened. But I also can’t live with myself knowing I hurt people who don’t deserve it.”
“You could start by having a conversation with the person at the center of all this.”
She turns to face me, wariness creeping into her expression. “You think I should talk to Matteo.”
“I think you’re torturing yourself over a situation that can’t be resolved by avoiding it.” I stand, moving closer to her. “And I think the guilt you’re carrying about hurting innocent people is going to eat you alive unless you find a way to address it.”
She scoffs and turns away. “It’s not that simple—”
“Isn’t it?” I challenge gently. “You’re angry at Matteo for lying to you. But that anger led you to hurt Bella and the twins, and now you feel guilty about that. The only way to fix the second problem is to address the first one.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, staring out at the city.
“I don’t know how to face him,” she admits finally. “I said terrible things. I compared him to Mario, Alessandro. I told him he never really loved me.”
“We all say terrible things when we’re angry,” I comment gently. “Do you believe that?”
“Believe what?”
“That Matteo never really loved you.”
“No.” The word comes out small, barely audible. “That’s what makes it worse. I know he loves me. I know he’s been a good father. But I was so angry about the lie that I wanted to hurt him, and I said the cruelest things I could think of.”
“Then maybe it’s time to have a different conversation.” I come up behind her and wrap my arms around her waist. She immediately leans into me. “One that’s not about hurting each other.”
She looks at me, vulnerability written across her face. “Will you help? I don’t think I can do it alone.”
I press a kiss to her head. “Of course.”
An hour later, I’m making a phone call I never thought I’d make.
“Alessandro?” Matteo’s voice is carefully controlled, but I can hear the underlying exhaustion. “Is everything alright? Is Bianca—”
“She’s fine,” I say quickly. “She’s safe. But she wants to meet with you.”
The silence that follows is so long I wonder if the line went dead.
“She…she wants to see me?” The hope in his voice is painful to hear.
“She’s been struggling with how things ended between you. With some of the things she said.” I choose my words carefully. “She’s ready to have a real conversation. No accusations, no cruelty. Just…talking.”
I can hear Matteo’s chair creak as he leans forward. “When?”
So much hope poured into one single word.
“This afternoon, if you’re available. At your place, if that’s okay. Neutral territory feels too formal for this.”
“Of course,” Matteo breathes. “Whatever she needs. Whatever she wants.” He pauses. “Alessandro? Thank you. For whatever you said to her, for helping her get to this point—thank you.”
I wince as I sit down. “Don’t thank me yet. This isn’t going to be easy for either of you.”
He exhales. “I know. But it’s more than I hoped for when this all started.”
Several hours later, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of mediating between two people who are barely holding themselves together.
The meeting takes place in Matteo’s study, the same room where so many family decisions have been made.
Matteo sits behind his desk, but he looks diminished somehow—like the fight has gone out of him.
His usually immaculate appearance is slightly disheveled, his shirt wrinkled, his tie askew.
There are shadows under his eyes that suggest he hasn’t been sleeping any better than Bianca.
When Bianca enters, she stops just inside the doorway, her hands clasped tightly in front of her.
She’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and minimal makeup, looking younger and more vulnerable than I’ve seen her in days.
“Hi,” she says quietly, the single word carrying the weight of everything unsaid between them.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Matteo replies, his voice rough with emotion. The endearment slips out before he can stop it, and I see Bianca flinch slightly.
“I—” She starts to speak then stops, pressing her lips together as if trying to hold back words that want to tumble out. “I need to apologize.”
Matteo leans forward in his chair, his hands gripping the edge of the desk. The love and yearning in his eyes is so palpable I have to look away. “Bianca, you don’t—”
“Yes, I do.” Her voice grows stronger, more determined. “I said horrible things to you. Things I didn’t mean. I compared you to Mario, and that was…” She takes a shaky breath, twisting the bottom of her sweater. “That was unforgivable.”
I watch Matteo’s face crumble slightly, the careful control he’s been maintaining starting to crack.
“I was so angry,” Bianca continues, her voice breaking. “I felt like everything I thought I knew about myself was a lie, and I wanted to hurt you the way I was hurting. But that doesn’t excuse what I said.”
“You were in shock,” Matteo says gently, rising from his chair and moving around the desk.
His hands twitch as if he wants to reach out to comfort his daughter but is resisting. “You’d just learned something devastating about your identity. Of course you lashed out.”
“At you, maybe. But not at Bella. Not at the twins.” Tears start streaming down her face and it takes everything in me to not jump up and comfort her. “They didn’t do anything wrong, and I was so cruel to them. Arianna just wanted to play with me, and I treated her like a stranger.”
Matteo stops a few feet away from her, his own eyes bright with unshed tears. “They understand, Bianca. They’re confused, but they understand that you were hurting.”
“No, they don’t understand,” she says fiercely, wiping at her blotchy red cheeks. “They’re babies. All they know is that the person they consider their sister suddenly—suddenly didn’t want them anymore.” She chokes on a sob. “And that’s on me.”
Matteo fights the urge to reach for her, and Bianca battles between her need for comfort and her lingering anger.
Neither of them knows how to bridge the gap that’s opened between them.
And that’s where I come in.
“Sit down,” I suggest quietly. “Both of you.”
They comply almost automatically, Bianca taking the chair across from Matteo’s desk while he settles back into his own seat.
The formal positioning feels safer somehow, less intimate than standing close together.
“Bianca came here because she’s been carrying guilt about that dinner,” I explain to Matteo who watches me with rapt attention. “But she’s also still processing the revelation about her parentage. You both need to acknowledge that this conversation isn’t going to fix everything.”
Matteo nods, moving his gaze back to Bianca’s face. “I never wanted to hurt you,” he says quietly. “Everything I did, every choice I made, was because I was trying to protect you.”
“I know,” Bianca replies, her voice barely above a whisper as she sniffles. “But that doesn’t change the fact that my entire identity was built on a lie.”
“Not a lie,” Matteo says urgently, leaning forward. “A…an incomplete truth. Everything else was real, Bianca. Every moment of love, every lesson I taught you, every time I held you when you had nightmares—that was all real.”
Bianca is quiet for a long moment, her hands twisted in her lap.
When she speaks, her voice is small and lost.
“I don’t know how to separate the lie from the love,” she admits. “I don’t know how to be angry about one without rejecting the other.”
The honesty in her words seems to break something in Matteo.
His careful composure cracks completely, and tears start flowing down his face.