9. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - The Day of the Arrest
I don’t look up when he walks into the office.
I’ve had twenty minutes to decide how I’m going to do this - twenty minutes of sitting on this floor with my marriage spread across my lap like evidence, twenty minutes of listening to his car idle in the driveway while he worked up the courage to face me.
I’ve decided I won’t scream. Screaming is exactly what he’s ready for.
Screaming would give him something to push against, something to apologize for, something that feels like a fight he knows how to win.
I’m not going to give him that.
I feel him stop in the doorway. The floorboards creak under his weight, and then nothing - just his breathing, harsh and uneven, filling up the silence between us.
I know what his face is doing without seeing it.
That careful blankness he wears when he’s working something out, the face I used to think just meant he was tired.
The face I kissed this morning before he left, believing it belonged to a man who had nothing to hide.
“Did my father kill that man?” I ask the photograph on the desk instead of him. Richard Stallone’s kind eyes stare up at me from the deck of a boat, squinting into sunlight he’ll never see again.
“Yes.”
The word lands like a stone in still water. No hesitation. No softening. Just yes, flat and final, after years of sitting across from my father at Sunday dinner and shaking his hand and calling him sir.
“You’re sure.”
“I’ve been sure for a long time.”
I nod slowly, like we’re discussing the weather.
Like my whole world isn’t crumbling around my ears while I sit here on the floor of his office in my cream dress, surrounded by proof that my husband is a stranger.
My fingers are numb where they’re gripping the marriage certificate, and I can feel my heartbeat in my throat, but my voice comes out steady.
“How long?”
“Alessia…”
“How long, Anthony?”
I hold up the marriage certificate so he can see the red circle around my father’s signature and his own handwriting in the margin.
Access to inner circle. Three words that reduce everything we’ve built to a transaction.
He doesn’t come any closer. He keeps one hand on the doorframe like it’s the only thing holding him up, and I watch his knuckles go white against the wood.
“From the beginning,” he says.
When I finally look at him, his eyes are red and his face is wet.
Tears are tracking down his cheeks, catching in the stubble along his jaw, dripping off his chin onto the collar of his shirt.
I’ve never seen Anthony Stallone cry - not at our wedding when his voice cracked on his vows, not when he told me about his uncle’s death, not once in our whole marriage.
I wait to feel something about it, and nothing comes.
He looks like a stranger wearing my husband’s coat.
“Our beginning?” My voice cracks, and I hate it for cracking. I hate that my body is betraying me while I’m trying so hard to be stone. “The gala? Or before?”
He swallows, and I watch his throat move.
I’ve pressed my mouth to that exact spot a thousand times - on lazy Sunday mornings when he was still half-asleep, on nights I couldn’t sleep and needed to feel his pulse against my lips, on the balcony of our honeymoon suite with the Mediterranean spread out behind us like a promise.
Now I can’t stop staring at it, memorizing the tendons standing out on his neck, the shadow of stubble I used to love scraping against my skin.
I hate myself for noticing. I hate that my body still knows his body, still wants his body, even now.
“Before,” he says. “I found out what your father did, and then I went looking for you.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. I knew it - I read it in the timeline, saw the dates lined up one after another like dominoes - but hearing him say it out loud is different.
Hearing him admit that every moment of our reunion was calculated, that he walked into that gala with a plan and I was the plan, that the man who held me while I cried about how long I’d waited for him was only holding me because I could get him closer to my father-
I can’t breathe.
I press my hands flat against the carpet and force air into my lungs. In. Out. In. Out. The fibers are rough against my palms, real and solid, something to anchor me while everything else falls away.
“You planned it,” I say. “The balcony. The champagne. All of it.”
“Yes.”
“And the courtship? The proposal? Our wedding?”
“Alessia, please-”
“Answer me.”
His face crumples, and when he speaks it comes out in pieces. “I told myself it was just access. That I could get close to your father through you without it meaning anything.”
“But it didn’t stay that way.”
“No.” He shakes his head, hard, like he’s trying to shake something loose. “It didn’t stay that way. I was lying to myself. I’d wanted to see you for years. The case gave me permission.”
“So which is it?” I push myself up off the floor, my legs unsteady beneath me, and I face him across the wreckage of his desk. “Was I the plan, or wasn’t I?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He just looks at me with those red-rimmed eyes, those familiar green eyes that I’ve looked into a thousand times, and I watch him search for words that don’t exist.
“Both,” he finally says, and it comes out flat, like a man reading something off a page.
“That’s the worst part. Being your husband put me at his table.
It put me in his cellar and in his study after dinner, where only family is allowed.
And I wanted you anyway, more than I wanted anything.
I told myself it was strategy, and I let myself fall in love with you, and I never figured out where one stopped and the other started. ”
I close my eyes. The room is spinning, and I can hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears, and somewhere underneath all the rage and grief and betrayal, there’s something else. Something that sounds a lot like the sob I’ve been holding in since he walked through the door.
“You used me,” I whisper.
“I fell in love with you again,” he says. “Harder than I did at sixteen.”
I open my eyes. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He flinches like I’ve hit him.
“Did you love me when you proposed?”
“Yes.” He doesn’t hesitate. “I tried to tell you that night in the vineyard. I said there was something you needed to know before I asked, and you said yes before I could get it out.”
I go very still.
The vineyard. Sunset bleeding through the vines, painting everything gold.
Anthony on one knee in the dirt, his hands shaking as he pulled out the ring.
There’s something I need to tell you first, he said, and I laughed and kissed him and said yes yes yes before he could finish, because I didn’t care, because I didn’t need to know anything except that he loved me.
I remember thinking he was nervous about the proposal. I remember being charmed by it - my confident, unflappable Anthony, nervous as a boy asking a girl to prom.
Now I’m turning the whole memory over in my hands, examining it from every angle, and it looks completely different. He wasn’t nervous about the proposal. He was trying to confess. He was going to tell me the truth, and I didn’t let him, and then he just - didn’t.
“But you didn’t tell me after,” I say.
“No.”
“You could have told me any morning of our marriage. You could have told me on our wedding night.”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. I watch him search for an answer that isn’t because I’m a coward or because I wanted both or because I kept promising myself tomorrow, and I can see the exact moment he realizes there isn’t one.
“That’s what I thought,” I say.
“I tried to stop it.” His voice is desperate now, pleading. “I asked them to pull the case days ago. I was at the station this morning, begging them to wait.”
“But you didn’t make it.”
“No.” He shakes his head, and more tears fall. “I got stuck in traffic. I got there too late. They’d already-”
“Stop.” I hold up my hand, and he goes silent immediately.
“I don’t want to hear about logistics. I don’t want to hear about traffic or timing or all the ways this could have gone differently if only.
You made choices, Anthony. Every single day of our marriage, you woke up next to me and made the choice to keep lying. ”
He doesn’t argue. He can’t.
I look down at the marriage certificate still clutched in my hand. My father’s signature is elegant and bold, the signature of a man who believes he has nothing to hide. Anthony’s notes in the margin are small and precise, the handwriting of a man who plans everything.
“Somewhere in these folders,” I say slowly, “there’s a date for every time I told you I loved you, isn’t there?”
“Never.” He steps forward, then stops himself when I flinch back. “Not once. I swear to God, Alessia. I never - I would never have written that down. What we had was separate. It was always separate.”
“How am I supposed to believe that?”
“I don’t know.” His voice breaks. “I don’t know how to make you believe anything anymore.”
“I can’t tell,” I say, and I watch the words hit him like a blow.
“I can’t tell which parts were real. You didn’t just take my father, Anthony.
You took every day of our marriage and made me read it twice.
Every kiss. Every conversation. Every time you told me you loved me.
I have to go back through all of it now and ask myself - was that real?
Was he pretending? Did he mean it, or was it just another line in his strategy? ”
He’s crying openly now - something I’ve never once seen in three years of marriage. Anthony is the steady one, the calm one, the one who holds me together when I fall apart. Seeing him break is like watching a building collapse in slow motion.
I walk past him into the hallway. He doesn’t try to stop me, just turns to watch me go, and I’m close enough that I can smell him - his cologne, his skin, the particular scent that’s always meant home to me. My body wants to lean into it. My body is a traitor.
“I’m going to pack,” I tell him without turning around. “And you’re going to stand there and let me.”
I hear him follow me down the hall. His footsteps are heavy, uneven, like he’s forgotten how to walk. When I reach our bedroom, I go straight to the closet and start pulling things off hangers, armfuls of clothes that I shove into the suitcase without folding.
Anthony stands in the doorway. He doesn’t block it, doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t do anything except watch while I tear our life apart one handful at a time.
“Where will you go?”
“Euridice’s.”
“Okay.”
I want him to fight me. The realization hits me like cold water, and I hate myself for it.
I want him to beg or grab the suitcase or give me any reason to throw something at his head.
I want passion, I want rage, I want anything except this hollow, awful quiet that’s filling up the space between us.
His sleeves are rolled to the elbow the way they always are when he works late.
I notice his forearms, the watch I gave him on our first anniversary still strapped to his wrist, the way his hands hang at his sides - those hands that have touched every inch of my body, those hands that wrote access to inner circle in the margin of our marriage.
When I reach past him for my robe on the back of the door, my shoulder brushes his chest. He makes a sound like I’ve wounded him - a low, broken noise that goes straight through me.
I don’t look at him. If I look at him, I’ll either hit him or kiss him, and I’m not going to give him either one.
I zip the suitcase closed. I walk down the stairs and through the foyer, and I can hear him following me, keeping his distance, giving me space I didn’t ask for.
At the front door, with my hand on the knob, I turn back one last time.
He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, his face wrecked, his shirt rumpled. He looks like a man watching his whole life walk out the door. Good. That’s exactly what’s happening.
“Did you ever think about what would happen to me?” I ask. “When he went to prison? When everybody found out?”
His face crumples. “Every single day. I kept thinking I’d find a way to give you the truth without…”
“Without losing me.”
“Yes.”
I almost laugh. “You lost me anyway.”
I pull the door open, and the whole front yard explodes in white light.
News vans are lined up along the curb, satellite dishes pointed at the sky. People with cameras are running up our front walk, trampling the flowers I planted last spring. A woman with a microphone is shouting my married name over all of them, her voice cutting through the chaos like a blade.
“Mrs. Stallone! Did you know it was your husband who turned your father in?”