3. Anthony
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Anthony
Now - The Day of the Arrest
My car is still running in a tow zone outside, and I’m standing in a police station begging a detective who won’t look me in the eye.
“You have to stop this.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s cracked and desperate in a way I’ve never let myself be in front of anyone except her. “I sat in this office with you. Simon was right there beside me. I told you I wanted out. You said I had until the end of the week.”
Detective Moore rubs the bridge of his nose. He’s a tired man with tired eyes, the kind of cop who’s seen too much to be surprised by anything anymore, and right now he’s looking at me like I’m a particularly complicated form he doesn’t want to fill out.
“You said you needed time, Mr. Stallone.” He sighs, settling back in his chair. “You never signed your statement back.”
“Then undo it.”
The words come out sharper than I mean them to.
I’m gripping the edge of his desk so hard my knuckles have gone white, and I can feel the sweat beading at my hairline, trickling down the back of my neck.
I woke up this morning with a plan. A simple plan.
Drive to the station, sign my name off it, come home and burn the rest, and tell her everything myself before anybody else could.
Instead I hit traffic on the bridge. Instead I sat in my car for forty-five minutes watching the minutes tick by and telling myself it was fine, there was still time, there was always still time.
There wasn’t.
“Undo what?” Moore spreads both hands flat on the desk.
“Pulling you out doesn’t pull the case. It hasn’t for the better part of a year.
All it was ever going to do is take your name off the front of it so you weren’t the man holding the knife when it came down.
” He lets me stand there with that. “I told you so in that chair. You heard me. You just wanted me to say something else.”
I did. Three days ago I sat in that chair for an hour waiting for him to say something else, and he never did, and I drove home and told myself I still had until the end of the week.
“They picked him up at lunch.” Moore finally looks at me, and that’s worse than when he wouldn’t. There’s something like pity in his face, or maybe it’s just exhaustion. “At his house. In front of his whole family.”
Lunch.
I was supposed to be there. I promised her I’d be there. I kissed her forehead at dawn and told her I had an errand, and she smiled at me with her eyes still half-closed and said don’t be late, and I said I won’t, and I meant it.
I meant it.
“Mr. Stallone?” Moore is watching me with something approaching concern now. “Are you alright?”
I have to grip the edge of his desk harder.
My uncle’s face rises behind my eyes the way it always does when I lose my footing - Richard, laughing at something I said over dinner the last time I saw him, the amber light of his study catching the silver at his temples.
Richard, teaching me to tie a tie before my first school dance.
Richard, putting his hand on my shoulder at my father’s grave and promising me I would never be alone.
Richard, dead on a mountain road because a man I’ve eaten Sunday lunch with for years decided he was inconvenient.
I’m supposed to feel victorious. I’ve waited for this day like a drowning man waits for air, lying awake at night imagining the moment Domenico Sartori would finally pay for what he did.
Every business trip, every late night in my office, every locked drawer and careful lie - it was all for this.
Justice. Revenge. The scales finally tipping back toward balance.
But the scales have Alessia on them now, and I can’t breathe.
My phone buzzes against my thigh. It’s been buzzing since I walked in, a persistent vibration that I’ve been trying to ignore, but I can’t ignore it anymore. I pull it out with numb fingers and look at the screen.
Seven missed calls. Every single one from Alessia.
There’s a voicemail notification too, and I almost don’t press play. I almost shove the phone back in my pocket and pretend I never saw it, because as long as I don’t hear her voice, I can pretend she doesn’t know yet. I can pretend the bomb I built hasn’t detonated in the middle of her life.
I press play.
“Anthony, call me. Something’s happened. Call me right now.”
Her voice is shaking. Even through the tiny speaker, even in twelve words, I can hear the tremor in it.
And underneath it, worse than the fear, is the confusion.
She probably doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know why her father just got dragged out of his own dining room, and she’s calling me because I’m her husband, because I’m supposed to protect her from things like this.
The second message is worse.
“Anthony, please. Please answer. I need you.”
I need you.
Three words. Three words she’s said to me a thousand times - in bed, in the dark, in the middle of fights and the middle of laughter and the quiet moments between.
Three words I’ve spent years earning, years building a life around, years telling myself I deserved even though I knew, I always knew, that I was stealing them.
I’m already running for the door when I remember what I left on my desk this morning.
The drawer. The fucking drawer.
I keep that drawer locked every single day - the one thing in our house that’s off-limits, the one secret I’ve guarded with obsessive care.
She’s teased me about it. She’s threatened to pick the lock.
She’s made jokes about secret families and offshore accounts and embarrassing poetry from college, and I’ve laughed along with her because that was easier than explaining why my hands shake every time I reach for the key.
This morning, I pulled everything out. I spread it across the desk because I needed to see it one more time before I destroyed it - the timeline, the bank records, the photographs of the man Domenico killed.
I was going to burn it all. I was going to drive to the station, stop the case, and then come home and feed everything to the fireplace and pretend none of it ever existed.
Instead I got stuck on the bridge. Instead the clock ran out. And now the drawer is standing wide open in my empty house, and everything I’ve hidden from my wife for years is sitting on my desk like an accusation.
“Mr. Stallone-” Moore starts, but I’m already gone.
I take the stairs two at a time, burst through the lobby, and nearly knock over a woman with a stroller on my way to the door.
My car is right where I left it, engine still running, a parking ticket already tucked under the windshield wiper.
I don’t care. I yank open the door and throw myself inside, and I’m peeling away from the curb before I’ve even got my seatbelt on.
The drive home takes forever. Every red light feels personal, every slow driver a conspiracy, and my phone keeps buzzing on the passenger seat with calls I can’t answer.
What would I even say? Sorry I missed lunch, sweetheart.
I was too busy watching your father get arrested for murdering my uncle.
Sorry I never mentioned that my entire relationship with you started as a revenge plot.
Sorry the drawer’s open - I know you must have questions.
I think about calling Simon. He’d know what to say.
He’s been my best friend since college, the only person who knows the whole truth, the one who sat beside me in Moore’s office and didn’t say a word when I asked to pull the case.
But Simon would tell me to face this head-on, to walk through the door and confess everything and beg for forgiveness, and I’m not ready for that.
I’m not ready to watch her face change when she realizes what I’ve done.
The thing about Alessia is, she looks at me like I’m good.
Not successful or handsome or charming - good.
Like I’m the kind of man who deserves to be loved without conditions, without caveats, without fine print.
She looked at me that way on the balcony the night we met again, and at our wedding when I slid the ring onto her finger, and this morning when I kissed her goodbye.
Don’t be late, she said.
I’m late. I’m so fucking late, and I don’t know how to fix it.
By the time I pull into our driveway, the sun is starting to set.
Her car is in its usual spot, which means Euridice must have driven her home - Alessia doesn’t drive when she’s upset, and she’s definitely upset.
The house looks the same as it always does, warm light in the windows, her flowers blooming in the boxes by the door, everything perfect and peaceful and completely fucking deceptive.
I turn off the engine.
I don’t go inside.
I sit there with my hands on the steering wheel and my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest, staring at the front door like it’s the entrance to my own execution.
She’s in there. She found the drawer - I know she did, because Alessia can’t resist a mystery.
She’s probably seen the files, the timeline, the folder with her name on it, the one that proves every moment of our relationship was calculated from the start.
I should go in. I should face her. I should get on my knees and explain that I never meant to hurt her, that somewhere along the way the lie became real, that I love her more than I ever thought I’d love anyone.
Instead I sit in my car in the dark and try to remember how to breathe. I know by the time she gets to the folder with her name on it, she’ll hate me. She might already hate me.
I know Domenico suspected, or worse he knew. Of course he knew.
I take my last breath, open the car door and walk toward the house, toward my wife, toward the moment when everything ends.