18. Anthony
— ? —
Anthony
Then - The Year He Came Back
The terrace behind the tent is empty except for us and a string of lanterns swinging in the wind off the water.
Domenico Sartori lights a cigar with the practiced ease of a man who’s done it ten thousand times.
He doesn’t offer me one. He just stands there at the railing with Long Island Sound stretching out behind him, dark and glittering under the stars, and he takes his time getting the cigar going while I wait.
I remember this from the guesthouse. The way he uses silence like a weapon, letting it stretch until you say something stupid just to fill it. I’m not sixteen anymore. I can wait too.
He’s older than he was that summer - heavier through the shoulders, silver threading through his hair at the temples. But he still smiles at me the same way. Like I’m the help. Like I’m something he could crush under his heel if he felt like it.
“You stayed away a long time,” he says finally, exhaling a cloud of smoke that drifts out over the water.
I keep my face neutral. “You were persuasive.”
“And now?” He turns to look at me, his eyes dark and unreadable in the lantern light. “You’re not afraid of me anymore?”
“I’m terrified of you.”
It comes out honest, which surprises us both. His eyebrows lift slightly.
“But I love your daughter more than I’m afraid of you,” I continue, and that’s true too - truer than I want it to be, truer than it should be given everything else I’m carrying. “And she isn’t sixteen anymore. Neither am I.”
He studies me for a long moment through the smoke. I let him look. I let him see what he wants to see - a man who’s been in love with the same girl for half his life and has finally crawled back to her. A fool. A lovesick idiot who couldn’t stay away.
It’s the easiest part I’ve ever played, because most of it isn’t acting.
“I was sorry to hear about your uncle,” Domenico says, turning back to look at the water. His voice is casual, conversational, like he’s commenting on the weather. “Terrible tragedy. Those mountain roads.”
Every muscle in my body locks.
My uncle’s face flashes behind my eyes - laughing at dinner, clapping me on the shoulder, telling me to have fun before I got on the plane to Tuscany. Richard, who raised me when I had no one. Richard, who took me in and loved me like a son and never once made me feel like a burden.
Richard, whose car went off a cliff on a mountain road that he’d driven a hundred times before. Richard, whose brake line was cut so neatly that it took the investigators months to figure out it wasn’t an accident.
They got as far as calling it a homicide and no further. No name, no hand, nothing to fasten it to. That is what I had the day I started: a murder with nobody’s name on it and a dead man nobody was going to answer for.
I think about the photographs I found in his files after he died. The letters between him and Domenico that went back years. The threats that started when Richard figured out what kind of business the Sartoris were really in and threatened to expose it.
I think about the moment I realized my uncle was murdered, and who murdered him.
“Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out perfectly even. “He was a good man.”
“He was.” Domenico taps his ash over the railing, watching it drift down toward the dark water. “My daughter has been unhappy since her mother died. Tonight she’s glowing.” He glances at me sidelong. “If you’re the reason…”
He shrugs, the gesture of a king granting a small mercy.
“Then we’ll see.”
I smile at him.
You killed him, I think. You killed the only family I had left, and I’m going to be standing right beside you when it costs you everything.
The realization hits me then, on that terrace with the lanterns swinging and the music drifting from the tent behind us.
I’ve been circling it for months, telling myself the plan was about justice, about evidence, about making sure Domenico paid for what he did.
But it’s simpler than that. It’s cleaner.
Only family sits at his Sunday table. Only family follows him down to the cellar and into the study after dinner, where the real conversations happen. Only family is trusted with the details that could bring down an empire.
If I’m Alessia’s husband, I’m family.
I want to take her home and get her out of that dress and ruin her in it until she can’t say her father’s name in order.
I want her on her back in my bed every night for the rest of her life.
I want a ring on her that nobody in that tent can argue with.
I want something between us that Domenico Sartori cannot undo with one telephone call.
I also want his cellar. His table. His throat.
And the filthy truth, the one I’m going to be answering for eventually, is that I cannot get a cigarette paper between those two wantings tonight.
I’ll be in the chair beside him every week. I’ll have access to everything he guards so carefully. And I’ll have her - every morning, every night, every moment in between.
It’s the cleanest plan I’ve ever made, and I want both halves of it so badly I can taste metal, and I have already decided which hunger I’m going to call the only one.
Domenico drops the cigar and grinds it out under his shoe, extinguishing the ember against the stone.
“Sunday,” he says. “Come to dinner. Family only.”
He doesn’t wait for me to respond. He just turns and walks back toward the tent, leaving me alone on the terrace with the wind off the water and the weight of what I’m about to do pressing down on my shoulders.
Through the tent flap, I can see Alessia. She’s standing near the entrance, her face turned toward the terrace, watching for me. When she spots me, her whole face lights up - relief and love and something that looks like hope, all tangled together in an expression that makes my chest ache.
She’s holding the door open without even knowing it.
I walk back into the light.