15. Adriana #2
It’s a small thing. A seat saved, a room offered, a name nobody knows.
But I drive home those afternoons feeling lighter than I have in years, and I think that might be the whole point.
Not the revenge. Not even Enzo. Just this: a life that’s starting to be mine, one boring ordinary piece at a time.
It comes out with Amelia, two days later, over the phone.
I didn’t plan to tell her. It just slips out, the way things do with Amelia, because she’s the one person left who knew me before all this and doesn’t want anything from me.
“Can I tell you something you can’t repeat? Like, actually can’t.”
“Obviously.”
“Viviana’s pregnant.”
Amelia goes quiet for a second. “Shut up.”
“She told me. Outside the building, when she cornered me. She said it’s Rafael’s.” I tuck my feet up under me on the couch. “She wasn’t bragging, Amelia. It came out of her like she didn’t mean to say it. She looked terrified.”
“Okay, wait.” I can hear Amelia sit up. “Wait. That doesn’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when did they even do it? She only came back, what, a few weeks before you walked out on Rafael. And you said she looked far enough along to be scared about it, like it’s real, like it’s a thing already.” A pause. “You don’t get like that in a couple of weeks. You just don’t.”
“That’s what I keep snagging on.” I press the heel of my hand against my eye. “It doesn’t line up. Unless…”
“Unless they’d been at it way longer than anyone thinks,” Amelia says, and her voice goes flat, like she doesn’t love where this is going. “Like, a lot longer. Like the night you caught them wasn’t anywhere near the first time.”
And there it is. The thing I haven’t let myself say.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “That’s what I think too.”
Because that’s the only version that makes the numbers work, isn’t it?
If they’d been sneaking around for months, long before the wedding fell apart, then she could be exactly as pregnant as she seems, and the night in that bedroom was just the one I happened to walk in on. Not a beginning. A middle.
It should hurt more than it does. Seven months of marriage and the whole thing was a set already in motion before I ever said I do. I keep waiting for it to knock the wind out of me, and it just doesn’t. It’s only information now. Something true I can file away and not feel.
“You okay?” Amelia asks, gentler now.
“I think so. It’s weird. I keep finding out new ways they lied to me and none of them hurt anymore.” I let out a breath. “Maybe that’s the part I should be worried about.”
“Or maybe you’re just done.” She says it simply. “People get done, Ana. It’s allowed.”
We sit with that for a second.
“Anyway,” she says, shaking it off the way she does, “you want to hear what everyone else is busy whispering about? Because they don’t know any of the stuff you just told me. They’re all still stuck on the wedding.”
“What about it?”
“Ana. Come on. From the outside? Your sister was supposed to marry Rafael. She bolts the morning of, no warning, just gone. Then a few weeks later it’s you standing up there marrying him instead.
” She says it almost gleefully. “Nobody got an explanation for any of that. So now Viviana turns back up, and the only thing the whole circle wants to know is where the hell she disappeared to, and why you ended up with her groom.”
“And nobody knows.”
“Nobody knows. She won’t say a word about where she was or who with, which of course makes everybody more obsessed, not less.
” Amelia drops her voice, delighted. “The going theory is a man. That she ran off with somebody, it went bad, and that’s why she came crawling home with her tail between her legs.
No proof. Just talk. But you know how it gets when there’s a hole in a story this juicy. People fill it in.”
“A man.” I turn it over. It doesn’t lead anywhere I can see, just one more piece that won’t fit the rest. “Who?”
“No clue. That’s the best part.” There’s not an ounce of guilt in it. “Honestly? Good. She spent fifteen years making everyone around her feel like dirt, including you, especially you. I hope they talk about her until she’s gray. I hope it’s the only thing anyone ever remembers about her.”
“That’s cold, Amelia.”
“It’s earned.” She doesn’t take it back. “She came for my best friend’s whole life. I’m allowed to enjoy the wheels coming off.”
I laugh, surprised, and she laughs with me, and we leave it there.
But it doesn’t leave me alone. It just settles in the back of my head next to the other thing I can’t sort out, the one about what I’m even doing here, and the two of them keep each other company all afternoon.
***
That evening, Enzo finds me on the couch with my laptop open to a page I’m not reading.
“You’ve been somewhere else all day,” he says. He doesn’t make it a question.
“Family stuff. Viviana stuff.” I close the laptop. “It’s nothing. It’s not even mine to be thinking about.”
He drops onto the couch next to me, close, and tips my chin up with two fingers so I have to look at him.
“You do a thing with your face when something’s eating at you. You’ve been doing it since this morning.” He studies me. “You gonna tell me, or do I have to guess? Because my guesses usually involve me driving somewhere and ruining somebody’s evening.”
“It’s really nothing.”
“Okay.” He lets it drop, which surprises me, because letting things drop isn’t really his sport. Then: “But when it stops being nothing, I want it. The good stuff, the ugly stuff, the stuff that isn’t yours to deal with. Hand it over and I’ll deal with it. That’s the offer.”
It’s not gentle, the way he says it. It’s almost a demand. And maybe that’s why it gets under my skin in a way gentle never has, because it doesn’t sound like a man being nice to me. It sounds like a man who means it.
My phone lights up on the cushion between us.
It’s Viviana. Not a call. A text, three words long, and the sight of her name makes my stomach drop before I’ve even read it.
I need you.