10. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - The Night of the Arrest
Euridice opens her apartment door in a silk robe, takes one look at my suitcase and my ruined mascara, and pulls me inside without a single question.
She locks both deadbolts. Slides the chain on.
The metallic click echoes through her foyer like a verdict, and I stand there dripping rainwater onto her marble floors while she studies my face with those dark eyes that have known me since we were children stealing cookies from Zia Carmela’s kitchen.
“Sit,” she says. “Don’t talk yet.”
I sit.
She disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a bottle of whiskey and two crystal glasses. The good stuff - the bottle her ex-husband left behind when he moved out, the one she’s been saving for a special occasion. She pours three fingers into each glass and presses one into my shaking hands.
I drink it like water. The burn barely registers.
She pours me another without a word.
It’s only when I’m curled on her couch with my knees pulled to my chest that I realize my wedding ring isn’t on my finger.
I took it off in the car so the driver wouldn’t see it.
I told myself that was the reason - that I didn’t want some stranger’s pity, didn’t want to answer questions about why a married woman was sobbing in the back of his cab with a suitcase and no destination.
But that wasn’t the reason. Not really.
I press my palm against my bare ring finger and feel the absence like a phantom limb.
I wore that ring every day for years. I felt its weight when I washed dishes, when I typed at my keyboard, when I reached for Anthony in the dark.
Now my hand feels wrong without it, and I hate that almost as much as I hate him.
“I tried to warn you,” Euridice says finally.
She’s sitting on the coffee table facing me, her knees pressed against mine, close enough that I can smell her perfume - something expensive and French that she started wearing after the divorce, like a declaration of independence.
Her face is carefully neutral, but I can see the tension in her jaw, the way she’s holding herself back from saying more.
“I told you he looked at you like he was starving and guilty at the same time,” she continues. “At your engagement party. At your wedding. Every time I saw him look at you, there was something wrong underneath it.”
“That’s not the same as telling me my husband was investigating my father for murder.”
“Would you have believed me if I had?”
I don’t answer, because we both know I wouldn’t have.
I would have told her she was jealous. That she was projecting her own failed marriage onto mine.
That she was trying to ruin the only good thing I’d ever had because she couldn’t stand to see me happy.
I would have defended Anthony with everything I had, because defending him felt like defending myself, defending the choice I made when I said yes on that balcony, defending the future I’d built in my head since I was sixteen years old.
I was so sure. That’s the part that kills me.
I was so goddamn sure that I knew him, that I understood him, that whatever secrets he kept were small and manageable and not worth worrying about.
I told myself that everybody has a locked drawer.
I told myself that trust meant not needing to know everything.
I was a fool.
“I should have pushed harder,” Euridice says quietly.
“I should have listened at all.”
The whiskey is hitting me now, softening the edges of everything, and I’m grateful for it. I don’t want sharp edges tonight. I want to be numb and soft and a very long way from the woman who stood in her own bedroom this afternoon deciding whether to hit her husband or put her mouth on his.
Why did I have to decide?
The question has been circling since I left, a vulture waiting to land.
I was furious. I was devastated. I was standing in front of the man who took my family apart and lied to my face for years, and my body put both of those things down and reached for him anyway.
It took everything I had not to do it. That’s the part nobody is ever going to hear about, because there’s no version of it I could say out loud without sounding like a woman who deserves what she got.
His shoulder brushed mine in a doorway and he made a sound like I’d wounded him, and I wanted him so badly I had to look at the floor.
That’s the part I can’t forgive. Not the files, not the folder with my name typed on the tab. That my body heard everything he said in that office and didn’t believe a word of it. That I know exactly what he is now, and it has made absolutely no difference to the way I want him.
Someone pounds on the door so hard the chain jumps.
Euridice’s face goes flat. She knows that knock - we both do. A second later, her mother’s voice comes through the wood in furious Italian.
“Euridice! I know she’s in there! Open this door!”
I go rigid. Zia Carmela was at the lunch today.
She watched her brother get dragged away in handcuffs while I sat frozen in my chair with my coffee cup shattered at my feet.
She’s never liked me much - I’m too quiet, too American, too much like my mother - but she’s always been civil. Family is family.
I don’t think she’s feeling civil tonight.
“Euridice!” More pounding. “I saw the news. I know what that husband of hers did. Open this door right now!”
Euridice doesn’t move. She just sits there on the coffee table, her spine perfectly straight, watching the door like it might burst open at any moment.
“I just want to talk to her,” Carmela continues, her voice rising. “I just want to ask her how long she knew. How long she sat at our table and ate our food and let that snake into our home-”
“She didn’t know,” Euridice calls out, her voice cutting through her mother’s tirade. “She found out the same time we did.”
“Then why is she hiding? If she has nothing to be ashamed of, why won’t she face me?”
I close my eyes. The words land like blows, each one finding its target with precision. Snake. Our home. How long she knew. I want to scream that I didn’t know, that I’m a victim too, that my husband lied to me just as thoroughly as he lied to everyone else.
But that’s not entirely true, is it? I married him.
I brought him to Sunday lunches, introduced him to my father, watched them shake hands and share wine and talk business like they were becoming family.
I opened the door and let him walk through it, and even if I didn’t know what he was doing once he got inside, I’m the reason he was there at all.
Zia Carmela is right. I am the one who brought the snake to the table.
“Euridice.” Carmela’s voice drops, intimate and vicious. “I know you want to protect your cousin. But think about what this looks like. Think about what people are going to say. She chose him. She chose him over us, and now-”
“Mamma.” Euridice stands and walks to the door, her silk robe swishing around her ankles. She presses her palm flat against the wood, close enough that her mother can probably hear her breathing. “Go home. Or I’ll have the doorman walk you out in front of the neighbors.”
Silence.
I can picture Carmela’s face on the other side of that door - the fury, the humiliation, the calculation as she weighs her options.
She’s never been good at backing down, but she’s even worse at public embarrassment.
The thought of being escorted out by a doorman while the building gossips watch will be unbearable.
Heels retreat down the hallway. The elevator dings.
Euridice doesn’t move until she hears the doors close. Then she turns around, and her face is tired in a way I’ve never seen before.
“She’ll be back,” she says.
“I know.”
“The whole family will be back. Tomorrow, the next day. They’re going to want answers, and they’re going to want someone to blame, and you’re the easiest target.”
I nod. I know this. I’ve known it since I watched my father walk out of his own dining room in handcuffs, his parting words ringing in my ears like a curse.
Ask your husband why he came back.
I’ve been asking. I’m not sure I like the answers.
Euridice comes back to the couch and settles beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. For a long moment, we just sit there in silence, watching the city lights flicker through her windows.
“What are you going to do?” she asks finally.
I find my wedding ring in my coat pocket. My fist closes around it, and I squeeze until the diamond cuts into my palm, sharp and grounding.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her, “I’m going to look my father in the eye and ask him if he killed a man.”
She makes up the spare bed and I lie in it in the dark, and my body does not care about any of the evidence.
I can still feel him. Not the marriage. Not the balcony. The specific humiliating fact of him, the weight, the way I have to breathe through the first inch of it every single time, the way I walk the following morning.
I press my thighs together and it does nothing at all.
I put my hand between my legs like a traitor, in my cousin’s guest room, on the day they took my father away in handcuffs. I think about the first time.
Nine days after that gala he drove me out of the city and a storm put the whole road under water, and he took the car up a wet bank and across the grass and parked us on a gravel lot above a highway where nobody was going anywhere for two hours.
I climbed over the console in my good black silk and got his belt open before either of us had agreed to anything, and I put my hand on him and went completely still, because ten years of imagining a man gives you nothing at all in the way of information.
I had to stop halfway down. He said take your time, you set it, breathe, look at me while you do it.
He was shaking. The rain came off that roof like gravel and the windows went white with us and I took the rest of him in one long slide, and I sat there stuffed and throbbing and had the mad thought that I’d been walking around empty for ten years without knowing there was a word for it.
Afterwards I pressed my knees together in the passenger seat and he watched me do it and said I was going to feel that tomorrow, and he wasn’t sorry, and I didn’t want him to be.
That is the man I am lying in my cousin’s spare room thinking about, on the day they took my father away in handcuffs.
I come on my own hand with my other fist in my mouth and it is thin and useless and nothing like him.
I hate him. I miss what he does to me. Those are not the same sentence and they are both happening in the same body, and there is nobody alive I could say that to.
I will die before I tell Euridice.