12. Mel
— ? —
Mel
He looks like he’s been hit by a truck.
Good. Join the club.
I keep walking up the path because stopping isn’t an option. If I stop, I’ll have to think. If I think, I’ll have to feel. And if I feel anything right now, anything at all, I’m going to shatter into a thousand pieces right here in Hattie’s yard, and I refuse to give him the satisfaction.
Two years. Rebuilding myself brick by brick, learning how to breathe again, becoming someone who doesn’t cry at the sound of Italian on a TV show. Middle-of-the-night feedings and first steps and Leo’s fearless grin and Junie’s cautious studying eyes. Healing.
And he’s just standing there in my yard like he has any right to be here, like he hasn’t already blown my life apart once.
“Melanie.”
His voice cracks on my name. Actually cracks, like a teenage boy’s, and I hate, I hate, that some treacherous part of me still knows exactly what that voice sounds like in the dark.
“You need to leave,” I say. Flat. Calm. A voice I practiced in mirrors until it stopped shaking.
“I can’t.”
“Then I’ll call the sheriff. Wisteria’s small. He’ll be here in four minutes.” I keep pushing the stroller. One step, then the next. The gravel crunches under my sneakers. Leo makes a happy sound at a passing butterfly.
Don’t look at him. Don’t look at the tattoos climbing out of his collar, the way his shoulders have gotten broader, the raw devastation on a face I used to kiss awake every morning.
“Please.” He steps into my path. Not blocking, he’s careful about that, leaving plenty of room, but close enough that I can see his eyes are red-rimmed. “Please, just - five minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Five minutes.”
“You’re not entitled to five seconds.”
“I know.” His voice is wrecked. “I know I’m not. But I’ve been looking for you for two years, Melanie. Two years. And I need you to know-”
“Know what?” I stop walking. I shouldn’t, but I do, because there’s a small, vicious part of me that wants to watch him squirm. “That you’re sorry? That you’ve changed? That whatever excuse you’ve cooked up is going to make up for what you did?”
“What I-” He blinks. Genuine confusion crosses his face, and it’s such a good performance I almost believe it. “Melanie, I don’t understand. You left. You left without a word, without a note, without anything except your ring on my-”
“I left because you asked me to.”
“I never-”
“I saw the papers, Santino.” My voice is rising. I can’t help it. Junie makes a worried sound in the stroller, and I force myself to breathe, to lower my volume. “I saw the divorce petition. Your signature. Your lawyer. Everything nice and official.”
His expression shifts. The confusion sharpens into a look that is horribly like hope.
“Those papers,” he says slowly, “were forged.”
I laugh. It sounds wrong even to my own ears, too sharp, too brittle. “Sure they were.”
“My mother forged them.” He steps closer, and I can smell him now, cedar and a darker note under it, not the cologne he used to wear.
New. “I came home from Tokyo and you were gone. Everything was gone. Chiara and I - we tore the house apart looking for answers, and we found the petition. My signature, perfect, on a document I never signed.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It’s the truth.” His jaw tightens. “I confronted my mother. She admitted it, Melanie. She said you were ‘never right’ for me, that she ‘did what needed to be done.’ I told her she was dead to me. I haven’t spoken to her in two years.”
I want to believe him.
I want to believe him so badly it terrifies me, because I remember what believing him felt like, safe and warm and completely, catastrophically wrong.
“And the affair?” The words come out before I can stop them. “Did your mother forge that too?”
“What affair?”
“Don’t.” I’m shaking now. “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“I don’t-” He runs a hand through his hair. It’s longer than it used to be, messier, falling across his forehead in a way that makes him look younger and older at the same time. “Melanie, I’ve never, never been unfaithful to you. Whatever you think you saw-”
“I saw photos.” My voice breaks on the word. Damn it. Damn it. “You and Allegra. At our lake, Santino. Our place.”
His face goes white. “What?”
“Your mother showed me. Right before she gave me the papers. Right before she told me-”
I stop. The words pile up in my throat like a traffic accident.
“Told you what?” He’s very still now. Very careful. Like he’s approaching a wounded animal. “Melanie. What did she tell you?”
Nothing. She told me nothing I’m going to repeat to you, not until I’ve had more than thirty seconds to process the fact that you’re here.
“It doesn’t matter.” I straighten my spine. “You should go home. Go back to your empire and your merger and your-”
“I never filed.” He cuts me off, desperate. “The petition was forged, I never signed it, I never filed it. We’re still married, Melanie. Technically, legally - we never stopped being married.”
My stomach drops straight through the floor.
I grip the stroller handle so hard my knuckles go white. “What?”
“We’re still married.” He says it like it’s a lifeline, like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth. “I never wanted a divorce. I never wanted anything but you. And I’ve spent two years trying to find you so I could tell you that.”
Still married.
I signed those papers. The night I left, my hand shaking so hard the pen nearly slipped, and all because I thought, I thought -
“I signed them,” I hear myself say. “I signed and I left the copies on the-”
“They weren’t valid.” His voice is gentler now, like he can see me crumbling. “They weren’t real. Whatever you signed, wherever you left them - it didn’t matter. The petition was never filed. There was never a case.”
I need to sit down. Call Chiara. Anything but standing in my front yard having this conversation with two toddlers in earshot.
“Okay.” I force the word out. “Okay. So you - so we - that’s-” I shake my head. “That doesn’t change anything.”
“It changes everything.”
“No.” Stronger now. Firmer. “It doesn’t.
Because even if the papers were forged - even if your mother did all of it - you still weren’t there, Santino.
You still chose work over me, every single time.
You still let your family treat me like garbage and never said a word.
You still-” My voice cracks again. “You still looked straight through me like I was invisible.”
He flinches like I’ve hit him.
“I know,” he says quietly. “I know I did. And I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
“Great. Forgiven or not, you need to leave.”
“I can’t.” He plants his feet. Not aggressive.
Stubborn. The same stubbornness I remember from a thousand arguments about nothing, about which wine to serve with dinner, about whether cats or dogs made better companions.
“I’m not leaving until we talk. Really talk.
Not about the papers, not about my mother - about us.
About what I did wrong and how I can fix it. ”
“You can’t fix it.”
“Then I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.”
That’s when the screen door bangs.
“Everything all right out here?” Hattie’s voice carries across the yard, flat and carrying, and I turn to see her on the porch, and she isn’t alone.
Behind her, Betty from the convenience store has materialized at the fence with Dolores and another auntie, arms crossed, and the sheriff’s cruiser is rolling to a slow, pointed stop at the end of the drive.
Word travels fast in Wisteria. Apparently it travels at the speed of one large tattooed stranger in a widow’s yard.
Hattie’s got a rag in one hand and, resting against the porch rail beside her, the shotgun. She’s not holding it. She’s just letting it be seen.
“Say the word, sugar,” she says to me, mild as milk. “And this fella takes a nap in the back of Cal’s cruiser till he remembers how planes work.”
And there it is. The choice, out loud, in front of witnesses. All I have to do is nod and my entire past gets driven to the county line. Every person in this yard is waiting for me to do it. Some of them are hoping.
Santino doesn’t argue his case. Doesn’t turn to charm them. He just looks at me, only at me, and waits, on his feet in the dirt, letting me hold the whole thing in my hand.
Leo picks that exact moment to reach both arms toward him and announce, to the entire assembled town, “Up!”
The silence that follows is its own kind of loud.
“He’s staying,” I hear myself say. To Hattie. To the sheriff. To Dolores, who makes a scandalized noise. “For now. He’s - it’s complicated. But nobody’s arresting anybody.”
Hattie studies me for a long moment. Then she picks the shotgun back up, tucks it under her arm, and says to Santino, in a voice that could freeze the pond: “You heard her. For now.” She jerks her chin at the cruiser. “Cal’ll be around. He’s got nothing better to do and a real long memory.”
The sheriff tips his hat. The aunties disperse, deeply disappointed. And I’m left standing in my own yard having just publicly declined to have my husband removed, which feels enormous and terrifying and like a door I can’t un-open.
“Fine,” I say to Santino, low, before I can lose my nerve. “Stay. Hope you brought enough money to settle down, because I’m not talking about anything until I’m damn good and ready. And right now, I’m not ready.”
I push the stroller forward. He doesn’t move.
And then, faster than I can dodge, his hand closes over mine on the handle. Gentle. Trembling slightly.
He’s looking at the stroller.
No, he’s looking in the stroller. At Leo, who’s grinning up at him with zero fear. At Junie, who’s studying him with those careful green eyes.
And then he’s on his knees.
This enormous tattooed man, kneeling in the dirt of Hattie’s yard, tears running openly down his face. Not sobbing, just crying, silently, like he doesn’t even know it’s happening.
“They’re mine?” he whispers.
There’s a lump in my throat the size of Texas.
Tell him. Tell him and watch his face light up and let him destroy you all over again.
“No,” I whisper back.
The lie tastes like ash on my tongue.
I pull my hand free and push the stroller past him, up the porch steps, through the front door, and close it behind me.
And then I sink down against it and cry.