16. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - After the Arrest
Simon is waiting for me on the front porch when I pull into the driveway.
He’s leaning against the railing with his hands in his pockets, looking exactly the way he always looks - casual, friendly, like someone you’d trust to hold your drink at a party.
I’ve known Simon for years. He was Anthony’s best man at our wedding.
He’s eaten dinner at our table a hundred times, laughed at my jokes, brought me flowers on my birthday because Anthony always forgot until the last minute.
And the whole time, he knew.
I sit in the car for a long moment, gripping the steering wheel, watching him through the windshield. He doesn’t move toward me. He just stands there, waiting, and I can see the tension in his shoulders even from here.
He was in the room when I asked the detective to pull the case.
Anthony’s words from yesterday have been circling in my head all night. Simon wasn’t just aware of the investigation - he was part of it. He sat in that detective’s office while Anthony tried to undo what he’d done, and he never said a word to me. Not a hint. Not a warning. Nothing.
I get out of the car.
Simon straightens as I approach, and I watch his face do something complicated - guilt and relief and wariness all fighting for dominance. He opens his mouth, probably to say something apologetic, something designed to smooth things over.
“Don’t,” I tell him before he can start. “I’m not here to talk. I’m here to get my things.”
He nods, slowly. “Anthony said you’d be coming. He asked me to give you space.”
“How generous of him.”
Simon flinches at my tone, but he doesn’t defend Anthony. He just steps aside and holds the door open for me, and I walk into the house I shared with my husband without looking at him.
The foyer looks exactly the same. Same hardwood floors, same antique mirror by the door, same bowl where Anthony always dumps his keys.
It smells the same too - like coffee and laundry detergent and something underneath that’s just us, just the accumulated scent of two people living together day after day.
I hate how much it hurts to be here.
“You knew.” I don’t turn around. “You stood up at my wedding with a whiskey in your hand and gave a toast, and you knew.”
“Yes.”
“And you let me marry him.”
“I told him that if he didn’t tell you, I would.” He shuts the door behind us, very quietly, the way you close a door in a house where someone is sick. “I gave him a deadline. It’s the only thing in this whole mess I’m not ashamed of.”
“A deadline.” I turn around. “How generous of you both.”
“I know it isn’t enough.”
“It isn’t anything.”
I head for the stairs without stopping, but Simon’s voice catches me halfway up.
“He loves you, Alessia.”
I turn around. He’s still standing by the door, his hands back in his pockets, his face earnest and open.
“I know you don’t want to hear it,” he continues.
“I know I’m the last person who has any right to say it.
But I’ve watched him for years. I’ve seen him with other women, before you, and it was never-” He shakes his head.
“He never looked at anyone the way he looks at you. Like you’re the only real thing in the room. ”
“The way he looks at me,” I repeat. My voice sounds strange, hollow. “You mean like he’s starving and guilty at the same time?”
Simon’s expression flickers. Recognition. Euridice must have said that to him at some point, or maybe everyone could see it except me.
“He wanted to tell you,” Simon says quietly. “So many times. I watched him work up to it over and over, and then lose his nerve.”
“That must have been very hard for him.”
The sarcasm lands like a slap, and Simon winces.
“I’m not defending what he did,” he says.
“I’m not even defending myself. I knew it was wrong.
I told him it was wrong, from the very beginning.
But he was so-” He stops, searching for the word.
“Broken. When he found out about his uncle, it broke something in him. And you were the only thing that made him feel human again.”
“So I was his therapy? His comfort object?”
“That’s not what I-”
“I don’t care what you meant.” I’m gripping the banister so hard my knuckles ache. “I don’t care about his reasons or his feelings or how hard this has been for him. He used me. He used me to get to my father, and you helped him, and there isn’t one single day of my marriage I’m allowed to keep.”
Simon is quiet for a long moment.
“Do you want help carrying anything?” he asks.
“No.”
“Okay.”
I climb the rest of the stairs by myself.
Our bedroom is exactly the way I left it the morning of the arrest. His side of the bed still unmade. My earrings on the nightstand where I dropped them. A paperback lying face down on the duvet with the spine cracked open, waiting for a woman who was going to come home that night and finish it.
I open the closet and start pulling things off hangers.
Here is the part nobody warns you about. It isn’t the enormous lie that takes you apart. It is that every small kindness has to come down off the shelf now and be held up to the light, one at a time, and I have no idea how to read a single one of them anymore.
The gray coat. I said I was cold at a street market in November and he vanished for twenty minutes and came back with it folded over his arm, so pleased with himself he could barely keep his face straight.
I have told that story at other people’s dinner tables.
I told it well. Now I’m standing in my own closet with the sleeve in my fist, trying to work out whether he bought it because I was shivering or because a man who buys his wife a coat gets asked back to her father’s table on Sunday.
Both. That’s the answer to all of it, and it is going to be the answer to all of it for the rest of my life.
I take the coat anyway. I’m not going to leave a good coat behind to make a point to a man who is not even in the house.
It takes me two hours to fill four boxes. When I carry the last one down, Simon is sitting on the bottom step with his head in his hands.
He gets up fast. “Alessia-”
“Don’t.”
“He’s going to ask me how you were.” His voice has gone hoarse. “What do I tell him?”
I stand in the foyer of the house I decorated, with a box against my hip and my husband’s best friend between me and the door, and I think about it properly. Because it matters. Because whatever I say next is the only thing I am going to be able to control for a long time.
“Tell him I’m done finding things out by accident,” I say. “If there’s anything left, he brings it to me himself. He doesn’t leave it on a desk for me to trip over and he doesn’t send you in to soften it first. He looks at me and he says it out loud.”
Simon nods slowly, the way a man nods when he’s being handed something heavier than he expected.
“And if there isn’t anything left?” he asks.
I set the box down on the floor of the foyer.
“Then he has nothing to be afraid of,” I tell him, “and we’ll both find that out at the same time.”
I should pick that box back up. I should carry it out to the car and drive away from it and never think about the inside of this house again.
Instead I look up the stairs.
There is one room I haven’t been able to make myself walk into. I have spent two hours packing around it the way you step around a hole in a floor, and it is still up there with the door open, the way he always left it, because the only thing in that room that ever mattered was locked.
“Alessia,” Simon says behind me. He knows exactly where I’m looking.
I stand outside his office door for a long time before I go in.
The police took the originals, but copies are still stacked on the desk, and the drawer, that goddamn drawer, still hangs open like a broken jaw.
Nobody has touched anything. The house has been sitting here for weeks holding the exact shape of the morning my life ended, waiting for somebody to come back and look at it.
The wastebasket under the desk hasn’t been emptied since that morning. There’s a crumpled ball of paper on top, torn from his desk calendar.
I don’t know why I reach for it. Instinct, maybe. Or just the pathological need to know everything, to see all the damage laid out in front of me so I can stop imagining things that are worse.
I smooth it out on my knee.
It’s the page for the day of the arrest. Across the printed date, in Anthony’s handwriting, pressed so hard the pen went through the paper, it says:
STOP THE CASE. Tell A. everything. Choose her.
I read it four times. My hands are shaking so badly the paper rattles.
“He wrote that the night before,” Simon says quietly from the doorway.
I didn’t hear him follow me. “Three days before the arrest, I drove him downtown myself. I sat in a plastic chair next to him while he told the detective he wanted his name off all of it. They told him he had until the end of the week to sign it back.”
I look up at him. His face is careful, neutral, but there’s something in his eyes that looks almost like pleading.
“He came out of that building and threw up in a trash can on the corner,” Simon continues. “I’ve never seen him like that. He was shaking so hard he could barely stand up.”
“Why should I believe a single word you say?”
“Because I’m not his alibi, Alessia. I’m the guy who was about to blow the whole thing up in his face.” Simon shoves his hands in his pockets. “The morning of, he left your bed at dawn and drove there to end it. He was too late. That’s all of it.”
I fold the note in half, then in half again. I don’t know why I do what I do next - I tuck it inside my bra, against my skin, where no one can take it from me. It feels important. It feels like evidence of something, even if I don’t know what yet.
I turn to go. Simon clears his throat.
“He’s started going out to his uncle’s grave every Sunday these past few weeks,” he says. “He never used to. He couldn’t stand to.”
I stop in the doorway.
“Which cemetery?”