5. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - The Day of the Arrest
Euridice drives me home because I can’t hold a steering wheel, and I make her leave me in the driveway.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, which is such an obvious lie that she doesn’t even bother arguing. She just looks at me with those dark eyes that don’t believe me for a second.
“I need to be alone,” I say. “Anthony will be home soon. He’ll explain everything.”
She doesn’t look convinced. “Ally-”
“Please.”
Euridice finally drives away, and I stand in the driveway watching her taillights disappear.
Ask your husband why he came back.
The words have been circling in my head since the dining room. I keep trying to make them mean something innocent. Maybe Papa was confused. Maybe he was lashing out, trying to hurt me because he was being dragged away in handcuffs.
Except my father doesn’t lash out. My father says exactly what he means, always, and the look on his face when he said those words wasn’t desperate at all.
It was satisfied.
I let myself in through the front door.
The house is silent. His car isn’t in the driveway. I stand in the foyer and call his name, my voice echoing off the high ceilings.
“Anthony?”
Nothing.
I walk through the rooms like I’m searching for something. The kitchen is clean - dishes from breakfast still in the sink. The living room is exactly how we left it. Everything looks normal. Everything looks like the life of a happy couple who had no idea their world was about to end.
His office door is open.
The door is always open - Anthony isn’t the type to lock himself away. The only thing in that office that’s ever been off-limits is the one drawer he keeps locked.
I teased him about it constantly. What are you hiding, love letters from an ex? And he’d laugh and pull me into his lap and tell me it was just boring financial stuff.
I walk toward the door.
His desk, usually neat to the point of obsession, is covered in papers. They’re spread across the surface in overlapping layers, some pinned down by books, others curling at the edges.
And the drawer - the drawer he’s kept locked every single day of our marriage - is hanging open.
Empty.
I reach for the light switch, and the room floods with brightness.
Photographs. Bank statements. A timeline in his neat, slanted handwriting that runs across three pages taped end to end. The papers are organized in some kind of system I don’t understand, with colored tabs and sticky notes and red lines connecting one thing to another.
My father’s name is everywhere.
I step closer. The timeline starts with a date I don’t recognize and stretches forward through years of my life. There are names I know: my uncles, my father’s business partners, men I’ve kissed on both cheeks at Sunday dinners.
In the center of it all is a photograph of a man I’ve never met.
He’s older, maybe in his sixties, with kind eyes and a weathered face. He’s standing on the deck of a boat, squinting into the sun, and there’s something familiar about him. The shape of his jaw. The way he holds himself.
Underneath the photograph, in red ink pressed so hard it tore the paper:
RICHARD STALLONE. MURDERED. DOMENICO SARTORI.
My knees give out.
I hit the floor hard enough to bruise. Anthony’s uncle. Richard Stallone, who raised him after his father died. He died in a car accident, Anthony told me once. A mountain road. Bad weather. They said he lost control.
But this says murdered.
This says my father killed him.
I pull the first folder into my lap and start reading.
The folder is thick with documents I don’t fully understand. Bank transfers, corporate filings. But I understand enough. Anthony has been building a case against my father for years. He believed - believes - that Domenico Sartori killed Richard Stallone and made it look like an accident.
My husband married me with a locked drawer full of evidence against my family.
The second folder is worse. Photographs of my father at various events, printouts of his travel schedule, a list of his properties. There’s a section on his habits - Sunday lunch with family, always at the house, never misses it - and another on his security detail.
Anthony has been studying my father like a specimen under glass.
At the bottom of the pile, there’s a thick blue folder with a single word on the tab in Anthony’s handwriting.
My name.
Alessia.
My hands are shaking so badly I almost can’t open it.
The folder is the neatest one on the desk, organized with colored tabs and dates.
There are screenshots of my social media going back years.
There’s a printout of the charity calendar my father’s company sponsors, with one gala circled in red: the gala where Anthony and I met again after all those years apart.
Beside the calendar is a guest list, my name highlighted in yellow. And on a sticky note beside it, in Anthony’s handwriting:
Balcony. She hates crowds. She’ll go outside after the second glass for sure.
I did.
I remember it so clearly - the crush of people, the noise. I slipped outside to get some air, and he was already there, leaning against the railing like he’d been waiting for me.
Because he did know. Because he planned it.
The timeline at the front of the folder is the worst part. The first entry is the day he learned his uncle’s accident wasn’t an accident. The second entry is the first time he searched my name, and there’s barely a page between them.
It runs three years and ten months.
I do the arithmetic standing in my husband’s office in the dress I put on for Sunday lunch, and it comes out to fourteen months of him finding his way back to me and two years and eight months of marriage.
I was sixteen the summer I met him. I am thirty years old.
There is not one day anywhere on this page when he wasn’t writing something down.
He knew what my father had done before he ever looked at me again. He walked into that gala with a plan, and the plan was me.
The courtship is logged with dates like appointments. First dinner - she’s more guarded than expected, adjust approach. Second date - mentioned her mother, use this. Proposal - vineyard, sunset, callback to first meeting.
Callback.
Like I’m a plot point in a story he’s writing.
On the last page is our marriage certificate. Someone has drawn a red circle around my father’s signature on the witness line. In the margin:
Access to inner circle.
I have to put my head between my knees.
That’s what I was. A door he needed to walk through. A way into the life of the man who killed his uncle.
Headlights sweep across the office window.
I hear his engine cut off in the driveway. Then nothing.
He doesn’t come inside. I sit on the floor with our marriage certificate in my hands and listen to my husband sit in his car in the dark. He’s deciding. What to say. Which lie to tell.
I wait.
Finally - finally - the front door opens.
I hear his footsteps in the foyer. Hesitant. Careful.
He stops outside the office door.
I look up, and there he is. My husband. The love of my life.
He’s standing in the doorway with his car keys still in his hand, and his face-
His face looks like mine feels.
“Alessia,” he says, and his voice cracks on my name. “Let me explain.”
I hold up the marriage certificate. The one with my father’s signature circled in red. The one that says access to inner circle in his own handwriting.
“Explain what?” I ask, and I don’t recognize my own voice. “Explain why you married me, or explain why you thought I’d never find out?”