11. Santino
— ? —
Santino
Two years, three months, and seventeen days.
That’s how long I’ve been counting. That’s how long I’ve been drowning in a silence so complete it has its own sound, a ringing in my ears that never stops, a phantom heartbeat where she used to be.
And now she’s standing twenty meters away from me, pushing a stroller up Hattie’s gravel path, and I can’t remember how to breathe.
Start at the beginning. Start at the end. Start anywhere but here, frozen in a stranger’s yard with your heart trying to claw its way out of your chest.
I came home from Tokyo to an empty house.
That’s the sentence that broke my life in half.
I came home from Tokyo to an empty house.
Her clothes were gone. Her books. The little ceramic cat she kept on the bathroom counter, the one she’d found at a market in Florence and named Gerald for reasons she never explained.
All of it, vanished. Like she’d never existed. Like I’d dreamed her.
And on my pillow. Our pillow, the left one, always hers. Her ring.
Just sitting there. Gold catching the afternoon light through the curtains she’d picked out. I remember standing in the doorway for what felt like hours, staring at that small circle of metal, waiting for reality to reassert itself. Waiting to wake up.
I didn’t wake up.
I tore the villa apart looking for a note, a clue, anything.
Her phone rang through to a voicemail that filled up, then to a disconnected tone.
I drove to every place we’d ever been, the trattoria in the hills, the waterfall where we had our first date, the cave behind the lake where I’d held her so close I could feel her heartbeat sync with mine.
Nothing. She was smoke. She was gone.
Chiara found me three days later, sitting on the floor of our bedroom with the ring in my palm and a bottle of wine I hadn’t touched.
My twin sister took one look at me and started crying, not soft, dignified tears, but the ugly kind, the kind that comes with hiccuping breaths and snot and hands that shake when they reach for you.
“What happened?” she kept asking. “Santi, what happened?”
I didn’t know. That was the worst part. I didn’t know.
“Mother,” Chiara said suddenly. Her voice went cold in a way I’d never heard before. “Mother was circling her. For days. I warned Mel - I told her our mother is never kind by accident.”
And I knew, the second she said it, that she was right. Because I grew up watching my mother work.
I was fourteen when I understood what she actually was.
There was a man named Ruggiero, a friend of my father’s, a decent man, the only one who ever dared disagree with my mother at a dinner party, and he had a daughter at my school, and one spring the whole family simply vanished from our lives.
No more invitations. No more holidays. I asked my mother why.
She was arranging lilies at the time, and she didn’t even look up.
“People make choices, Santino, and choices have prices. Ruggiero forgot that.” Six weeks later there were ugly rumors about him in all the right drawing rooms, none of them quite provable, all of them ruinous, and his daughter had been quietly pulled from my school.
My mother sent white lilies to the party where everyone finally cut him. The same lilies she’d been arranging.
She never raised her voice. She never left a fingerprint.
That was the terrifying part, my mother could end a person over breakfast and be pleasant about it through lunch.
I spent my whole childhood mistaking that for strength.
I taught myself to compartmentalize the way she did, to keep the real things locked away where they couldn’t be used against me, and I was so proud of how much like her I’d become.
And then I married a red-haired girl who tackled me in the dirt, and I brought her into my mother’s house, and I never once stopped to think about what happens to the people my mother decides are in the way.
Mel had no idea. She thought she was surviving cruelty. She was standing in the path of a woman who had buried better-defended people than her, and I, God help me, I was too busy with a merger to see the lilies being arranged.
We went through everything. Every document, every email, every scrap of paper in the house. And that’s when we found it.
The divorce petition.
My signature. Perfect. On a document I’d never signed, requesting a divorce I’d never wanted, ending a marriage I’d have died to protect.
I stared at it for so long my vision blurred. My own handwriting, or close enough. The loops, the slant, the way I always crossed my T’s too aggressively. Someone had studied me. Someone had forged me.
“Mother,” Chiara whispered again, but this time it wasn’t a question.
I drove to my parents’ house at two in the morning. My father was traveling, when isn’t he, but my mother came down the stairs in her silk robe with her hair perfect and her face already arranging itself into concern.
“Santino, darling, what’s wrong? It’s the middle of the-”
“What did you do?”
She blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“What did you do?” Each word came out flat as a slap.
I held up the papers. My hand was shaking.
My whole body was shaking. “This isn’t my signature.
This isn’t my petition. And Mel is gone, Mother.
She’s gone and her ring was on my pillow and you were ‘circling her’ and I swear to God if you don’t tell me what you did-”
“Lower your voice.” Her tone went sharp. “I did what needed to be done. That girl was never right for you, Santino. She was a harvest worker. A nobody. And now she’s gone, and you can finally-”
I don’t remember what I said next.
I remember the sound of my own voice, though.
Raw and broken and so full of rage it scared me.
I remember my mother’s face going white, then red, then settling into a hard, hateful mask.
I remember telling her she was dead to me.
That she would never speak to me again. That if she ever came near my wife, because Mel was still my wife, would always be my wife, I’d burn her entire world to the ground.
Every word of it, I meant.
After that, everything changed.
I moved out of the villa that same week. Found a small apartment in the city, two rooms, a kitchen the size of a closet, no view. I didn’t want a view. I didn’t want anything beautiful. I wanted four walls that didn’t echo with her laughter, a bed that had never held her warmth.
Allegra I cut off completely. Changed my number, reassigned the merger to another partner, refused every meeting she requested. She sent letters for a while, confused, then angry, then pleading. I burned them without reading past the first line.
My father, when I told him what Mother had done, looked at me with those cold eyes of his and said, “Marriage is a business arrangement, Santino. You’ll find another suitable match.”
I haven’t spoken to him since.
The only person left was Chiara. My twin, my other half, the one person in my family who had ever truly seen me. She searched with me, every contact, every database, every favor we could call in. But Mel had vanished so completely it was like she’d never existed at all.
I started therapy because I was drowning.
Dr. Ricci’s office became the only place I could breathe.
Once a week, I sat in that leather chair and tried to explain the shape of the hole in my chest. I talked about the guilt, all those dinners where I should have defended her, all those late nights with work when I should have been home, the way I’d let the merger consume me until I couldn’t see straight.
I talked about the rage, this white-hot thing that lived in my bones and had nowhere to go.
“The rage needs somewhere to live,” Dr. Ricci said once. “Find it a home that isn’t your body.”
So I found the gym.
Every day. Sometimes twice. Lifting until my muscles screamed, running until my lungs burned, punching bags until my knuckles bled through the wraps. I put on forty pounds of anger, forty pounds of grief, forty pounds of I’ll find her and I’ll make this right.
The tattoos came slower. One at a time, each one deliberate.
The first was small, a cluster of stars on my left forearm, for the night I proposed to her on the hillside with Orion blazing overhead.
Then a vine crawling up my right arm, because she’d loved the vineyard, she’d belonged there in a way I never had.
More followed. My back, my shoulders, my chest. Each one hurt, and each time the needle bit into my skin, I thought: good.
feel it. remember why you’re still breathing.
The last one was over my heart.
Our lake. The curve of it, the waterfall, the cave where I’d first told her I loved her. And underneath it, in script that the artist said would hurt like hell because of the placement:
Melanie.
It did hurt like hell. I told him to keep going.
Two years, three months, and seventeen days.
I set up alerts on her name in every app, every country, every database I could access legally or otherwise.
I paid private investigators so much money I lost count.
I learned to function, to eat, to sleep, to run the parts of the business that still needed running, but I was hollow inside. A walking wound in an expensive suit.
And then, three days ago, my phone buzzed with an alert I’d almost stopped believing would ever come.
A newspaper article. A tiny Texas paper in a town called Wisteria. A human-interest piece about a record-breaking apple at some orchard called Golden Apple.
And there, in the second paragraph, was her name.
Mel Jordan, the orchard’s office manager…
Jordan. Her maiden name. Like she’d erased me completely.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except the address, the town, the fact that she was real and somewhere and I could finally, finally -
Six hours later I was on a plane. Chiara promised to follow as soon as she could rearrange her schedule. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said. “Don’t do anything you.”
I didn’t promise.
The town was small. Impossibly small. The kind of place where everyone knows everyone and strangers stick out like broken teeth.
I asked around carefully, Hattie’s orchard, do you know it?
, and got directions from an old woman at a bakery who looked at me like I was either very lost or very interesting.
And now I’m here.
Standing in a yard full of apple trees with my heart in my throat, answering a gray-haired woman named Hattie’s questions on her porch and getting nothing back, trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to say when I see her.
Hattie’s face goes white at whatever is over my shoulder. Footsteps on the gravel behind me.
I turn.
And there she is.
There she is.
Mel. My Mel. Walking up the path with the afternoon sun catching her red hair and her green eyes wide with a look I can’t read from here, shock, maybe, or fear, or the same desperate hope that’s been keeping me alive for two years.
She’s here. She’s real. She’s -
She’s pushing a stroller.
A double stroller.
My brain stutters. Stops. Restarts.
There are two children in that stroller. Small. Toddlers, maybe. I can’t see their faces from here, but I can see chubby legs kicking, small hands waving at the trees.
Two children.
Two.
The math hits me like a freight train. The timeline. The way she vanished. The way she took everything and left only her ring.
My knees feel like water. My vision is tunneling. Everything except her and that stroller is going blurry at the edges.
Two children.
And she never told me.
She never -
Oh God.