13. Adriana
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Adriana
The function is in a hotel ballroom downtown. Huge chandeliers, gleaming floors, waiters gliding around with trays like they’ve done it a thousand times.
Enzo’s hand is on the small of my back the whole way in, warm through the thin fabric of the dress. I’m grateful for it. Without it I think I might turn around and walk straight back out.
“Breathe,” he says under his breath.
“I am breathing.”
“You’re holding your breath. I can feel it.”
I let it out. He’s right. I make myself take another one, slow, the way I practiced in the car.
The room is already full when we walk in.
Heads turn. I expected that, but expecting it and feeling it are different things, and for a second the old instinct kicks in, the one that wants to shrink, to make myself smaller, to find a wall to stand against and disappear into.
I’ve spent my whole life being the girl no one looked at twice.
Being looked at like this, all at once, makes my skin prickle.
Then I catch our reflection in one of the big mirrored panels along the wall. Me in the red dress, chin up, Enzo beside me in his black suit with his hand on my back like he has every right to it. We look like we belong here. We look like we own the place.
I keep my chin up.
“Drink?” Enzo asks.
“Champagne.”
He lifts two flutes off a passing tray without even looking and hands me one. I take a sip. It’s good. Of course it’s good.
We move through the room and people part for us.
Some of them I half-recognize, faces from old parties, from a life I used to stand at the edges of.
A few of them nod at Enzo, careful little nods, the kind you give someone you’re not sure you’re allowed to be seen with.
He ignores most of them. The ones he does acknowledge get nothing more than a flick of his eyes.
“You know everyone here,” I say.
“I know enough of them. They know me.” He takes a sip of his drink. “They know I don’t need a single one of them. That’s the only thing that matters in a room like this. Who needs who.”
“And nobody needs you.”
“Nobody needs me. But a lot of them want something from me.” He looks down at me, and there’s that sharp edge to his mouth. “That’s better than being needed. Need makes people desperate. Want makes them careful.”
I file that away to learn later.
For about fifteen minutes it’s almost easy.
We drift, we sip champagne, Enzo says quiet cutting things about the people we pass and I have to bite my cheek not to laugh.
I start to think maybe this is fine. Maybe they won’t even come.
Maybe I can just stand here in this dress feeling like someone and never have to do any of this.
Then the big doors at the far end open, and they walk in together.
My father first, in his good suit, the one he wears when he wants to look like old money instead of just having it. Dante beside him, the two of them mid-conversation, playing at the friendship they perform in public. Then Rafael. And then, on Rafael’s arm, in pale green silk, my sister.
Viviana.
My stomach drops. I knew they’d be here. I prepared for it. But seeing them, all four of them, walking in like nothing happened, it knocks the air out of me anyway.
I tug Enzo’s sleeve. He follows my eyes.
His hand slides from my back to my waist, and his grip tightens, pulling me a fraction closer into his side. Not enough for anyone to notice. Enough for me to feel it.
“There they are,” he says.
I nod. I can’t make my mouth work.
It takes them a moment. They’re scanning the room on the way in, looking for who’s here, who matters. Then my father’s eyes land on us.
I watch it happen. I watch the exact second he sees me, sees the dress, sees whose side I’m standing on. His face goes through something fast and ugly before it settles into the cold blank mask I know so well.
Dante sees us a beat later, and he doesn’t bother with a mask. He just looks furious.
Rafael’s mouth actually falls open.
And Viviana. Viviana looks at me, then at Enzo, then back at me, and her face does something I’ve never seen it do before. Something that isn’t quite anger and isn’t quite jealousy but lives somewhere between the two.
They come toward us. All four of them, cutting across the room, and people notice, the way they always do right before a scene.
“Here we go,” I murmur.
“Right here,” Enzo says, low, his hand firm at my waist. “I’m not going anywhere.”
My father reaches us first. He stops close, too close, and lowers his voice to the register he uses when he wants to threaten you without anyone hearing.
“Adriana. Get away from him. Now.”
Three days ago that voice would have moved my feet before my brain caught up. I feel the old pull of it, the muscle memory of obeying.
I don’t move.
“I’m here with Enzo, Father.”
His jaw works. He turns to Enzo instead, like I’m a problem he can route around. “You. Is this why she’s gotten it into her head to humiliate this family? Because you put ideas in her?”
I open my mouth to answer for myself, but Enzo’s already talking, easy and unbothered.
“I didn’t put anything anywhere, Fernando. She came to me.” He takes a slow sip of his champagne. “She makes her own calls. You’d know that if you’d ever once asked her what she wanted.”
My father’s face goes a shade darker.
“Adriana.” Rafael steps up beside my father, and his voice isn’t angry, it’s pleading, which is worse. “Can we just talk? Please. Five minutes.”
I look at him. Really look. The handsome careless face I spent seven months trying to read, trying to earn something from. And I feel almost nothing. A little pity, maybe. The way you’d feel for a stranger who’d embarrassed himself.
“No,” I say.
“You can’t be serious about this. About him.” His eyes flick to Enzo and back. “You don’t even know what you’re doing.”
“You’re right. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s new.” I hear my own voice come out even and sure, and I could almost laugh at how good it feels. “But I’m doing it anyway.”
Dante shoulders forward. He doesn’t lower his voice the way my father did. He doesn’t care who hears.
“You’ve gone too far,” he says to Enzo. “She is your brother’s wife.”
“Not for much longer.” I reach into my bag.
I’ve been carrying the envelope all night. I felt it the whole time, the corner of it pressing against my hip, this small dangerous thing I brought into the room. I take it out now and hold it out to Rafael.
“It’s a divorce filing,” I say. “Sign it.”
Rafael stares at the envelope and doesn’t take it.
My father snatches it out of my hand before Rafael can move. “Are you out of your mind? You’re doing this here? In front of everyone?”
“You picked the venue, Father. I just brought the paperwork.”
“Adriana, I’m not signing anything.” Rafael finds his voice. “I don’t want a divorce.”
“And yet.” I let my eyes go to Viviana, in her green dress, on his arm. “Here you are.”
“What are you even doing with him?” Viviana cuts in. She tilts her head, and there’s the sneer I grew up under, the one that always made me feel two inches tall. “Did you cry at his door? Beg him to let you tag along so you wouldn’t have to show up here alone?”
A few days ago that would have landed. It would have found the soft part of me and stuck.
Now it just sounds like noise.
“Actually,” Enzo says.
He sets his champagne down on a passing tray. He takes my hand, lifts it, and presses his mouth to my knuckles, slow, his eyes on Viviana the whole time.
“We’re together,” he says. “She’s with me.”
The silence around us cracks.
“What?” Rafael says, too loud. Heads turn at the tables nearest us. “You’re… what?”
“You heard him,” I say.
Viviana laughs, but it comes out wrong, too high. “Together. Please. She begged you to play pretend, didn’t she? Look at her. Why would you…”
“I found her,” Enzo says, and his voice drops.
Quiet, which is worse than loud. People lean in without meaning to.
“Alone. With nowhere to go, because none of you bothered to give her one.” He looks at Rafael.
“I begged her. Not the other way around. You had her for seven months and never once saw what you had. I saw it years ago.”
Rafael blinks. “Her? Really?”
Enzo takes one step toward him. Just one. But something in the way he does it makes Rafael’s mouth shut, makes Dante put a hand on Rafael’s arm.
“Say it like that again,” Enzo says, pleasant as anything. “About her. I’ll make sure every door in this city that’s ever been open to you closes by morning. Try me.”
Nobody says anything.
I’ve never had someone stand in front of me like this.
My whole life I’ve been the one who absorbs it, who stands there and takes it and apologizes for existing.
Watching Enzo put himself between me and them, watching Rafael go pale and Dante go still, something in my chest pulls tight and hot and I have to look away before it shows on my face.
I make myself stand straighter instead. I make my voice carry.
“Sign the papers, Rafael.” I say it loud enough that the nearest tables can hear.
Loud enough that this becomes a thing people saw, a thing they’ll repeat.
“We don’t have a prenup. The longer you drag this out, the more my lawyer asks for.
And you’ve already made your choice.” I look at Viviana, then back at him.
“You wanted the original. Have her. It’s not like a piece of paper ever stopped either of you anyway. ”
Viviana’s face goes red.
“Adriana!” my father snaps.
“What?” I turn on him, and for the first time in my life I’m not afraid of what comes next. “You want to do this here? Fine. Let’s do it here.”
“You are an ungrateful, spoiled…” He catches himself, lowers his voice again, shaking. “If you do this, you are no daughter of mine. Do you understand me? You walk away from this family tonight, you have nothing. No name. Nothing.”
“I already told you that on the phone,” I say. “I meant it then too.”