12. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - After the Arrest
The visiting room smells like floor wax and stale coffee, and every table around me is full of other families having conversations I don’t want to overhear.
A little boy at the next table stares at my father until his mother turns him around by the shoulders.
I can’t blame him. Domenico Sartori doesn’t look like he belongs in a place like this - even in his jumpsuit, even with his silver hair mussed and his face unshaven, he carries himself like a man who’s merely visiting.
Slumming it. Waiting for someone to realize there’s been a terrible mistake.
He sits down across from me and folds his hands on the table exactly the way he folds them at the head of the Sunday table.
That’s somehow the worst part - the familiarity of the gesture, the way his body still moves through the motions of authority even when everything that gave him that authority has been stripped away.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he says.
“I needed to know if it’s true.”
“Which part?”
The question almost makes me laugh. How many parts are there? How many lies have I been swimming in, thinking I could breathe?
“All of it,” I say.
He’s quiet for a long time. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, and I can hear someone crying a few tables away, and my father just sits there studying me with those dark eyes that have always seen more than I wanted them to.
“I did what I had to do to protect this family,” he says finally, and his voice is the same voice that read me bedtime stories, that walked me down the aisle, that called me every Sunday morning just to hear how I was doing. “To protect you.”
“By killing people?”
“By removing threats.”
The words don’t change his expression at all.
He says them the way he’d tell me the weather, the way he’d discuss wine vintages or business deals or any of the thousand ordinary things we’ve talked about over the years.
Removing threats. Like Richard Stallone was a weed in his garden.
Like a man’s life was just an obstacle to be cleared away.
“Richard Stallone was going to expose everything I built,” he continues. “Everything that would have been yours one day. I couldn’t allow it.”
I take the photograph out of my coat and put it on the table between us, face up, and I turn it round so it’s the right way up for him.
He looks down at it.
And for the first time in thirty years I watch something go out of my father’s face.
It’s small. Anybody else in this room would have missed it. But I’ve spent my whole life learning to read that face across a dinner table, and something leaves it, the way the air leaves a room when a door opens somewhere else in the house.
“Where did you get that.”
“Rosa was packing the hall drawer.”
“Give it to me.”
“No.”
His hand stays out on the table between us, palm up, for longer than either of us can stand.
“Riccardo e io,” I say. “That’s your handwriting.”
“Alessia.”
“You were friends.” My voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to me.
“Not business. Not a man who turned into a problem. You were on a boat with him with your shirt open, laughing at somebody. You wrote his name on the back in pencil and you put it in the drawer by the front door and you looked at it every day for thirty years on your way out to the car.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“How long was he your friend?”
“Since before you were born,” my father says.
It’s the only thing he gives me in the whole forty minutes that I believe completely, and it is worse than all the rest of it put together.
“Did you do it yourself?”
“No.”
“Were you there?”
He doesn’t answer that one either, and the not answering goes into me like something cold going into water.
“So you had him killed.”
“I made a decision. The same kind of decision I’ve made a hundred times to keep this family safe, to keep you safe, to protect the life I’ve spent decades building.”
I want to be sick on the table. I want to overturn it, to scream, to do something that will crack that terrifying calm and show me the monster underneath.
But my father doesn’t crack. He never cracks.
That’s what makes him so dangerous - the way he can do monstrous things and still look like someone’s beloved nonno.
“And Anthony?” I lean forward, pressing my palms flat against the cold table. “When you threatened him? We were children, Papa. We were sixteen years old.”
Something flickers across his face. Surprise, maybe, that I know about the threat. Or satisfaction that I’ve finally started asking the right questions.
“I was protecting you from a boy who would have dragged you into a world you weren’t ready for.”
“You were protecting yourself.”
His smile is thin and bitter, and it transforms his face into something I don’t recognize. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
The words hit me like a slap. That’s exactly what Euridice said to me, the same construction, the same bitter truth. The two people who know me best, and they both reached for the same phrase to describe the way love and selfishness tangle together until you can’t tell them apart.
“I’m not taking anything of yours,” I tell him. My voice is shaking, but I don’t care anymore. “Not the apartment, not the accounts, not a single thing you ever paid for with that man’s life.”
“The forty acres at the top of the hill were never mine to give you.” He says it the way he corrects a waiter.
“Your mother signed the old block and the guesthouse and the cellar over to you when she knew she was going. She wrote it so it wouldn’t reach you until you were eighteen, and she made me put my name under hers, and I did it because I could refuse that woman nothing and because I assumed you would never once want it.
” He lets that land. “Everything else on that hill I built around them. Take your forty acres, figlia mia, and see how far they carry you.”
“You’ll take it.” He doesn’t sound angry or disappointed. He sounds certain, the way he always sounds when he’s predicting how someone will behave. “You don’t know how to live any other way.”
“Watch me.”
He tilts his head and studies me, the way he studied Anthony once on a terrace in Tuscany. The way he studies everyone who sits across from him, calculating their worth, their weaknesses, their breaking points.
“You’re asking yourself whether he ever wanted you, aren’t you?” he says.
I hate that he can still read me. After everything, after all of it, he can still look at my face and see the question I haven’t asked out loud.
“Did he?” The words scrape out of me before I can stop them.
“Figlia mia.” He leans closer, and his voice drops so the guard by the door can’t hear. “He didn’t come back for you. He came back for me. You were the door he walked through.”
I’ve heard this before. Anthony said almost the same thing in his office, trying to explain how he justified it to himself.
I told myself it was just access. But hearing it from my father is different.
Hearing it from the man Anthony was hunting makes it sound true in a way Anthony’s confession didn’t.
“You think you’re choosing between your father and your husband.” He settles back in his chair like we’re deciding on a wine. “You’re choosing between two men who used you. The difference is that I did it to keep you, and he did it to take you.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“No,” he agrees. “They’re not.”
He lets that sit on the table between us until I want to crawl out of my own skin.
“So ask yourself one question, figlia mia, and answer it honestly, because I’m the last person alive who has no reason left to lie to you.” He leans in. “In all those Sunday dinners, in all those years in your bed, did he ever once try to stop it?”
“He did.” The words come out fast, too fast. “He went to the station. He told them to pull the case. He was on his way there the morning you were-”
I stop.
He was on his way there. He told me he was on his way there, in his office, with the drawer hanging open and my whole life in pieces on the desk between us.
That’s the entire body of evidence. His word, given to me at the worst moment of my life by a man who had been lying to me since the night we met.
I have nothing else. Not a receipt, not a witness, not one person who saw him walk into that building.
Papa watches me find the bottom of it. He doesn’t gloat. He doesn’t need to.
“I taught you to check,” he says quietly. “I’m glad something took.”
“Ask him what he said to me on the terrace at Sofia’s wedding,” Papa continues, and there’s something in his voice now, something that sounds almost like enjoyment. “Ask him what he promised me that night.”
I don’t know what that means. I was at Sofia’s wedding - my cousin’s wedding, the one where Anthony danced with me until my feet hurt and told me he couldn’t wait to marry me someday. I remember the terrace, the lights strung through the olive trees, the way the music drifted out from the ballroom.
I remember my father putting a hand on his shoulder and walking him out of that tent. I remember standing there with the band playing and the flap falling shut behind them. I never asked either of them what was said out there, and not one of them ever told me.
“What did he promise you?”
But Papa just smiles that thin, bitter smile and leans back in his chair.
“Ask your husband,” he says, and the words echo through me like a curse. “If he has the courage to tell you the truth about that night, maybe you’ll finally understand what you married.”