21. Anthony
— ? —
Anthony
Now - After the Arrest
I kneel in the wet grass and brush the leaves off my uncle’s headstone with my bare hands.
The granite is cold under my fingers, slick with morning dew.
RICHARD STALLONE BELOVED UNCLE. That’s all it says.
I wanted to add more, maybe something about who he was, what he meant to me, the way he laughed at his own terrible jokes or the patience he showed a grieving four-year-old who couldn’t understand why his father wasn’t coming home.
But Richard hated sentimentality. He would have wanted something simple.
I couldn’t come here for years.
After he died, after I found the files and realized what Domenico had done, I tried once.
I drove to the cemetery and sat in my car in the parking lot for two hours, and then I drove away without ever getting out.
The guilt was too heavy. The knowledge that I was going to use his death - that I was going to make his murder the foundation of a revenge plot that would consume my entire life - made it impossible to face him.
Now I come every Sunday.
It started after the arrest, after Alessia left.
I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
The house was empty, the investigation was over, and all the purpose that had driven me for years had evaporated, leaving nothing behind but wreckage.
So I came here. I knelt in the grass the way I’m kneeling now, and I talked to him.
I told him everything. The plan. The lies. The way I fell in love with Alessia for real and couldn’t figure out how to stop. The morning I tried to pull the case and failed. The look on her face when she found the files.
He doesn’t answer, of course. He’s been dead for years, and the dead don’t offer absolution. But I keep coming anyway.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” I tell the stone. “I don’t know if it can be fixed.”
The wind picks up, rustling the leaves of the oak tree that shades his plot. Somewhere in the distance, a car door slams.
“I tried to tell her. I tried so many times. But every time I got close, I’d look at her face, and I’d think-” My voice breaks.
“I’d think, this is the last time she’s going to look at me like that.
The last time she’s going to love me without knowing what I am.
And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give that up. ”
Footsteps on the gravel path behind me.
I know them before I turn around. I’ve known the sound of her walking since I was sixteen - the particular rhythm of her stride, the way her heels hit the ground. Even now, even after everything, my body recognizes her before my brain does.
Alessia stops a few feet away.
She’s wearing a black coat, simple and elegant, and she’s holding a single white rose in her hands.
Her face is pale, and there are shadows under her eyes that tell me she’s been sleeping as badly as I have.
She looks exhausted and beautiful and so far away from me that she might as well be on another planet.
“Simon told me where to find you,” she says.
“You didn’t have to come.”
“I know I didn’t.”
She walks past me, close enough that I can smell her perfume - still not jasmine, still that lighter scent she switched to years ago - and she lays the rose on the grave.
It’s a simple gesture, but it undoes something in my chest. She didn’t know Richard.
She never met him. But she brought him a flower anyway.
She stands there for a long moment, looking down at his name carved into the stone.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “For what my father did to him. For all of it.”
“You don’t have to apologize for him.”
“Someone should.”
Her voice is steady, and it wrecks me. She’s apologizing for a murder she had no part in, taking responsibility for sins that aren’t hers, and meanwhile I’m kneeling here with years of lies between us and no idea how to bridge the gap.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about him?” she asks, turning to face me. “Not the case. Just him. What he was like.”
I stay on my knees. I don’t deserve to stand in front of her.
“Because I was ashamed,” I say. “Because telling you who he was would have meant admitting why I came back. And I didn’t want to be that man. Even when I was him.”
She’s quiet for a long time. The wind lifts her hair across her cheek, and she lets it stay.
“Simon told me about the station,” she says finally. “About the note.”
“It’s true.”
“I know it’s true. I don’t know what it means.” She wraps her arms around herself, and I want so badly to reach for her, to pull her against my chest and warm her the way I used to. “I keep wanting it to be enough, Anthony. And it isn’t.”
This is the moment.
I’ve carried the tin box here every Sunday since the arrest, tucked in the pocket of my jacket like a talisman or a curse. Every Sunday I’ve told myself I would show it to her if she came. Every Sunday she didn’t come, and I carried it home again.
But she’s here now. She’s standing in front of me, wavering, and I can see the war on her face - the part of her that wants to forgive me fighting the part that knows she shouldn’t. I could let her keep wavering in my direction. I could hold back the last secret and hope she never finds out.
I’d be managing her all over again.
I get up, brush the grass off my knees, and walk to my car. The tin box is in the glove compartment where I left it. It’s dented at one corner, and the paint’s worn through where my thumb rests on the lid. I’ve opened it so many times that the hinges are loose.
I bring it back to her and hold it out.
“There’s something else,” I say. “You asked me at the gala if I got your letters.”
She goes absolutely still.
“I got them.” I open the lid so she can see what’s inside. “All twelve. My uncle handed them to me one at a time. Every time, he told me to write back. Every time, I didn’t.”
Her breath catches. She’s staring at the letters like they’re ghosts - pale envelopes in her round, sixteen-year-old handwriting, the paper soft and worn from being unfolded so many times.
“Your father said he’d ruin Richard if I contacted you,” I continue.
The words are razor blades in my throat, but I force them out anyway.
“So I read every word you wrote me, and I never answered. I let you think I didn’t care.
And then at the gala, you looked me in the eye and asked if I got them, and I lied to your face. ”
“You let me cry on that balcony.”
“Yes.”
“You held me while I cried about letters you had in a box the whole time.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” She looks up at me, and her eyes are blazing with something between fury and grief. “I would never have found out.”
“Because I’m done deciding what you get to know.” My voice cracks, but I don’t look away. “You wanted all of it. This is the last of it.”
I want to close my hand around her wrist when she reaches for the box. I put both hands in my pockets instead, which is the single hardest thing I do all year.
“You wanted all of it,” I say. “So hate me for the letters. Hate me for every page in that drawer. But you don’t get to disappear on me.
If you try it I will find you, and not to bring you home.
To put eyes on you and confirm you’re breathing, and then I’ll go.
That’s the one thing I’m not giving you. ”
She stares at me. It’s too much. I know while I’m saying it that it’s too much and I say all of it anyway.
“Okay,” she says, which is not permission.
It isn’t permission. I know exactly what it isn’t, and I don’t get to pretend otherwise, so I take my hands out of my pockets and hold the box out to her instead of saying one more word.
She takes the box out of my hands like it might burn her. She lifts out the first envelope and unfolds the letter inside.
“Get away from me,” she says without looking up.
I turn and walk down the path toward the gate. Every step feels like dying. But looking back would be asking for something, and I’ve taken enough from her already.
“Anthony.”
I stop.
“This is the first time I’ve believed you,” she says.
I turn around slowly.
She’s lifting the envelopes out one by one, her face wet with tears she’s not bothering to wipe away. And then she reaches the bottom of the box, and she goes still.
There’s one more piece of paper underneath her letters.
A thirteenth envelope, sealed, addressed to her in my handwriting.
The handwriting of a sixteen-year-old boy who sat at his uncle’s kitchen table months after he got home, with her twelfth letter open in front of him, and finally tried to answer her.
I never sent it. I couldn’t send it. But I couldn’t throw it away either, so I kept it with hers, and I’ve been carrying it around for over a decade.
She holds it up, a question in her eyes.
“I wrote it after the twelfth,” I say. “The one where you said goodbye. I got as far as sealing it.”
I stop. There’s nothing I can say that will make this better.
She tucks the envelope into her coat pocket without opening it.
“I’m going to read this alone,” she says. “And then I’m going to decide what to do.”
She walks past me, toward the gate, toward whatever comes next. I stand by my uncle’s grave and watch her go, and I don’t try to follow.