22. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - Six Weeks After the Arrest
Papa has held a memorial Mass for my mother every year since I was seven, and he’s never missed one.
This year, his chair in the front pew is empty.
I sit alone at the end of the second row with my mother’s rosary wrapped around my fingers, the beads worn smooth from decades of use.
They smell like her, still, after all this time - jasmine and something softer underneath, something I can’t name but would recognize anywhere.
I press them to my lips and try to feel her here with me, but all I can feel is the weight of every pair of eyes in this church on the back of my neck.
Zia Carmela sits directly behind me, close enough that I can hear every word she whispers to her sister.
The girl who couldn’t see what was sleeping beside her.
My cousins shift their weight to make room between us, like what I have might be contagious. The pew creaks. Someone coughs. And I sit here with my mother’s rosary and the note from Anthony’s calendar folded inside my bra, pressed against my heart like evidence of something I haven’t decided yet.
The priest begins the first reading, and I try to listen. I try to focus on the words, on my mother’s memory, on anything except the hollow ache in my chest. But my mind keeps wandering to the letter I opened last night.
The thirteenth envelope, sealed for over a decade.
Wait for me, he wrote when he was sixteen and terrified. I’ll come back when I’m old enough that nobody can make me leave.
He came back. He came back exactly like he promised, and then he lied about everything else, and I don’t know how to hold both of those things in my hands at the same time.
Halfway through the reading, I feel it.
I don’t know how - some change in the air, some instinct buried so deep in my body that it bypasses my brain entirely - but I turn my head, and Anthony is standing in the very back of the church beside the doors.
He’s alone, in a black coat, with a fading bruise along his cheekbone from the photographer’s camera.
The light through the stained glass windows falls across his face in patches of red and gold, and he looks exhausted and beautiful and so far away from me that he might as well be in another country.
He isn’t trying to come closer. He’s just standing there, hands at his sides, watching the altar.
He’s here. At my mother’s memorial. A woman whose face he’s only seen in photographs, whose voice he’s never heard - but he’s here, standing at the back of her church like he has every right to mourn her.
The reading ends. The congregation rises for the Gospel. I stand with them, my legs unsteady beneath me, and I keep my eyes on the altar while my heart pounds against my ribs.
At the sign of peace, everybody turns to shake hands with the people around them.
Nobody turns to me.
I watch my relatives reach past my pew to clasp hands with each other, watch them smile and murmur peace be with you to everyone except the woman sitting alone at the end of the second row.
Zia Carmela’s whispers have done their work.
I’m a pariah now, contaminated by association with a man who destroyed our family.
Something in me goes quiet, and then it goes hard.
I stand up and walk out of my pew and straight down the center aisle in front of the entire family, my heels echoing off the stone.
Behind me, I hear Zia Carmela’s gasp. I hear the rustle of people turning in their seats, the murmur of shocked whispers spreading through the congregation like wildfire.
I don’t stop. I don’t look back.
Anthony’s face goes pale as I approach. His hands come up slightly, like he’s not sure whether to reach for me or defend himself, and his eyes are wide with something that looks like terror.
I stop in front of him.
“You don’t get to touch me the way you used to,” I say quietly, just for him. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
“Okay,” he breathes.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I know.”
“They’re all looking at you like you’re a dead man walking.”
“Let them.” His voice drops, rougher now, like he’s dragging it over gravel. “I’m not here for them.”
I search his face for the lie. For the angle. For whatever calculation is running behind those dark eyes. But all I see is a man standing at the back of a church like he’s waiting for a verdict he already knows will destroy him.
“You think showing up here fixes something?”
“No.” He doesn’t flinch. “I think showing up here is the only thing I know how to do. I don’t know how to stay away from you anymore.” His throat moves. “I never did.”
Something in my chest twists, and I hate it. I hate that he can still do this to me with nothing but words and that look on his face - like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s spinning out from under him.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
I take his hand.
His fingers are cold as I lace mine through them. It feels like the crumbling wall behind the church when I was sixteen, like jasmine and grief and the first time I ever let myself need someone. His whole body goes rigid, and I hear his breath catch.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I say.
“I know.”
“I’m not forgiving you.”
“I know.” His voice cracks on the second word. He clears his throat, but it doesn’t help. “I’m not asking you to.”
I turn and face the altar beside him.
His hand is shaking in mine.
“But this,” I say. “I can do this.”
His hand goes rigid in mine, and then still, the way a man goes still when he’s decided not to move at all.
“Then I’ll take it.” Barely a whisper. “I’ll take whatever you give me.”
“Even if this is all there is?”
He doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is stripped down to nothing. “Even if this is all there ever is.”
He doesn’t pull me against him. He doesn’t look at my family. He stands at the back of my mother’s church holding my hand like a man holding a ledge, and he lets every one of them look at him doing it.
We stand at the back of the church holding hands for the rest of the Mass, and my whole family watches us do it.
When it’s over, the rain has started. People hurry past us to their cars with their coats over their heads, avoiding my eyes, pretending not to see us standing together in the doorway.
Anthony starts to let go of my hand.
I tighten my fingers.
He stills. Looks down at our hands, then at me. Something flickers across his face - hope, maybe, or the thing that comes before hope when you’re too afraid to name it.
“Come with me,” I say.
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet.” I pull him toward the door. “Outside.”
We step out into the downpour.
The rain soaks through my coat in seconds.
It plasters my hair to my face and runs down my neck, and I don’t care.
Anthony’s coat is already dark with water, clinging to his shoulders, and he doesn’t move to shield himself.
He just stands there, looking at me like I’m something terrifying and sacred, like I might vanish if he blinks.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.”
“I know.” His mouth twists into something that’s almost a smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“I’m trying to stop. It’s not-” He breaks off.
Runs his free hand through his wet hair, and the gesture is so familiar it makes my chest ache.
“It’s not as easy as I thought it would be.
Unlearning the things that kept me alive. ”
I don’t respond to that. I’m not ready to.
“I have questions,” I say instead.
His whole body tenses. “I know you do.”
“And you’re going to answer them. All of them.”
“Yes.”
“Even the ones that make you look worse?”
He holds my gaze. Rain runs down his face, catching in his eyelashes, dripping off his jaw.
“Especially those.”