25. Adriana #2
“You came,” he says to Enzo.
“You asked me to.”
“I didn’t think you would.” His eyes move back to me. “Either of you.”
“Is there a problem with me being here?” I ask.
“No. No problem.” Rafael steps aside. “Come in.”
The house is almost the way I left it. I lived here for seven months, in a room down the east hall I was barely allowed to make noise in, and I haven’t set foot inside since the morning I walked out and didn’t come back.
The marble floors. The art that costs more than my building.
The silence that swallows sound. It all rushes up at me at once, that old feeling of being a guest in a place that was supposed to be my home.
But it’s different now, and it takes me a second to find it.
The flowers on the hall table are dead in their water.
There’s a stack of mail no one’s opened.
A film of dust on the banister I used to watch Elena wipe down twice a day.
The house was always cold, but it was kept.
Now it just feels left. Like everyone who was supposed to be in it has gone somewhere else and nobody told the rooms.
“He’s in the study,” Rafael says. “He has good days and bad days. Today’s not one of the good ones.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Enzo asks.
“Cancer. Lungs. They caught it late.” Rafael’s voice goes flat, like he’s said the words too many times. “There’s not much they can do.”
“How is that possible?” The question comes out sharper than I mean it to. “I saw him a few months ago. At the function. He was fine. He was shoving his way across a ballroom to scream at us.”
“That’s what nobody can wrap their head around.
” Rafael shakes his head. “It moved fast. Faster than the doctors have ever seen, they keep saying, like that’s supposed to be a comfort.
One month he’s complaining about a cough that won’t quit.
The next they’re telling us to get our affairs in order.
” A bitter breath. “He spent his whole life sure he could outmaneuver anything. Turns out not this.”
I glance at Enzo. His face gives away nothing.
“How long?” he asks.
“Months. Maybe less.”
“Where’s your mother?” The question comes out of me before I think about it. If a man is dying, his wife should be here, in the house, somewhere.
Rafael’s mouth twists. “Spain. Or Portugal by now, maybe. There was a party. A friend’s villa on the coast.” He says it without much feeling, like he stopped expecting anything from her a long time ago. “She said she’d come back if things got worse. She’s been saying that for a month.”
Enzo and I look at each other. I don’t have to say it and neither does he.
Of course she’s not here. Of course Cecilia is on a coast somewhere with a glass of wine in her hand while her husband rattles when he breathes.
It would be sad if it were surprising. It isn’t.
It’s just small and pathetic, an absence from a woman who was never really present even when she was in the room.
“Figures,” Enzo says quietly.
“Yeah.” Rafael almost smiles. “Figures.”
For a second the two of them look like brothers again, joined by the one thing they can still agree on, which is how thoroughly their parents failed at the job.
“I want to see him,” Enzo says.
“I’ll take you.” Rafael starts down the hall, then pauses. Turns back. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here. Both of you.”
He walks away before either of us can answer.
The study hasn’t changed.
The study is the one room in this house I was never really allowed into.
I came in once, for a dinner where the wives were meant to smile and disappear, and the rest of my marriage it stayed shut to me like a door I wasn’t important enough to open.
The oak desk. The leather chairs. The smell of cigar smoke and old money.
The room where Dante Vitale ran everything.
He’s by the window now. Smaller than I remember. Thinner. The illness has hollowed him out, turned the man from my memory into a fragile, breakable thing.
He looks up when we walk in.
“Enzo.” His voice is still the same, cold and measured, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. “And the girl. Rafael’s wife.”
“Soon to be ex-wife,” I say, keeping my voice level. “He hasn’t signed yet.” I won’t let him see me flinch.
“Ah. Yes. The divorce.” Dante’s lip curls. “A mess. The whole thing was a mess from the start. I should have known better than to trust your father with the details.”
I feel Enzo tense beside me. He steps forward slightly, not in front of me, but next to me. Shoulder to shoulder.
“I didn’t come here to talk about Ana,” he says.
“No? Then why did you come?” Dante leans back, studying his son. “To gloat? To watch the old man die? I’m sure you’ve been waiting for this a long time.”
“I haven’t been waiting for anything. I stopped thinking about you years ago.”
Even I can tell it’s a lie. But Enzo sells it.
“Is that so.” Dante coughs, wet and rattling, the kind that shakes his whole frame. When he recovers he’s paler. “Then why are you standing in my study?”
Enzo doesn’t answer right away. I can feel him gathering himself. All those years, compressed into this one moment.
“I came to tell you something,” he says finally. “And then I’m leaving.”
“By all means.”
“You threw me out when I was eighteen. Told me I was a disappointment. Told me I’d never be anything without the family name holding me up.
” His voice stays level. “I spent years trying to prove you wrong. Building something just to throw it in your face. Winning just to make you see that you were the one who failed, not me.”
Dante’s expression doesn’t change. The same cold face he always wore.
“And?” he says.
“And I’m done.” Enzo takes a breath. “I’m not proving anything to you anymore.
I don’t need you to see me succeed. I don’t need your approval or your blessing or your name.
I spent half my life letting you live in my head, and I’m done renting you the room.
You can die thinking you were wrong about me, or die still sure you were right.
It doesn’t matter. Because I know the truth.
And so does everyone who actually matters to me. ”
The silence stretches.
Dante looks at his son a long beat. And then, something I don’t expect, he laughs. A dry, rattling sound that turns into another cough.
“You think you’ve figured something out,” he says when he can speak. “You think you’re better than me. But you’re just like me, Enzo. You always have been. Cold. Calculating. Willing to do whatever it takes. The only difference is you pretend to have a conscience.”
“I’m nothing like you.”
“No?” Dante’s eyes glitter. “You took your brother’s wife. You got where you are by being harder than everyone around you. You stand there with your righteous little speech, but underneath it, you’re mine. You’ll always be mine.”
I wait for Enzo to crack. For the old man to get under his skin the way he always could.
He doesn’t.
“No,” he says. “I won’t.”
He turns to go. I’m already moving toward the door.
“She’ll leave you,” Dante calls after us. “They always do. When they see what’s underneath. When they see the real you. She’ll leave, and you’ll have nothing.”
Enzo stops. Turns back.
“She already left,” he says. “She saw everything. The real me, all of it. And she came back anyway. That’s the difference between you and me, Father. Someone actually chose me.”
He takes my hand. We walk out together.
I don’t look back. Neither does he.
Rafael is waiting in the hallway.
He looks between us, reading something in our faces, in our joined hands.
“That sounded like it went well,” he says. Dry. Almost a joke.
“About as well as expected,” Enzo answers.
The three of us stand there. Brothers who turned into strangers. The woman who used to be married to one of them. I should feel awkward. Instead I just feel tired.
“Can I talk to you?” Rafael asks. He’s looking at me now. “Both of you. Just for a minute.”
Enzo glances at me. I nod.
“Fine,” he says.
Rafael leads us to a sitting room, neutral ground, away from Dante’s orbit. He doesn’t sit. Neither do we.
“I owe you an apology,” Rafael says. He’s looking at me. “Both of you, but you most of all, Ana.”
I wasn’t expecting that. From the way Enzo’s hand tightens in mine, neither was he.
“The wedding,” Rafael goes on. “The marriage. All of it. I knew what I was getting into, an arrangement, not a love story. But I never once thought about what it was like for you. What it felt like to be handed over like that. I just went along with it because going along with it was easier than fighting.”
“You were kind enough, when you bothered to be there,” I say, and I don’t try to soften it.
“That’s almost the worst part. You’d talk to me, you’d see me, and then you’d disappear for days and I’d remember none of it was real to you.
And then I walked in on you and my sister.
So don’t tell me you just went along with it.
You went along with it right up until the second it cost me everything. ”
“I know.” He has the grace to look ashamed.
“I kept you at arm’s length and told myself it was kinder that way.
It wasn’t. I made you live in this house as my wife and treated you like you were standing in for someone else.
Like you were the version of Viviana that showed up, and I was just waiting to see if the real one came back.
” His voice goes rough. “That’s the thing I did to you.
Not the wedding. Our fathers did the wedding.
I’m the one who let you sit at my table for seven months feeling like a placeholder in your own marriage.
I knew you felt it. I watched you feel it.
And I let it happen because looking at it straight would’ve meant doing something, and doing something was harder than letting you think it was your fault.
I’m sorry. For that. Specifically for that. ”