23. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - Six Weeks After the Arrest
The rain is coming down so hard on the roof of Anthony’s car that we have to raise our voices to hear each other.
The church lot is emptying around us, headlights cutting through the downpour as my relatives drive past. Every single one of them slows down to look through the fogged windshield, their faces pale blurs peering in at us like we’re animals at a zoo.
I can imagine what they’re thinking. I can imagine what Zia Carmela will say at dinner tonight, how she’ll describe this moment to anyone who’ll listen.
I don’t care.
Anthony is sitting rigid in the driver’s seat, his hands on the wheel even though the engine is off. He’s soaked through, his black coat dripping onto the leather seats, and he hasn’t looked at me since we got in the car. He’s waiting. Bracing himself for whatever comes next.
“Who helped you?” I ask.
“Simon.” His voice is steady, but I can see the tension in his jaw. “Only Simon.”
“Every Sunday dinner?”
“Every Sunday.” He finally turns his head to look at me, and his eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted. “I went home and wrote down every name he said while you slept.”
The words land like stones in my chest. I think about all those Sunday nights, lying tangled together in our bed, my body still warm from his hands. I think about drifting off to sleep while he held me, believing I was safe, believing I was loved.
While he got up and walked to his office and wrote down everything my father had said.
“The cellar?” I ask.
“Every time he took me down there.”
“My birthday, when Papa gave you his watch?”
He closes his eyes. “I had it checked for anything useful.”
I remember that birthday. Papa clasping the watch around Anthony’s wrist, telling him it was a family heirloom, that he wanted his son-in-law to have it. Anthony’s face had been so carefully neutral, and I’d thought he was just overwhelmed by the gesture. Moved by my father’s acceptance.
He was calculating how to use it.
“My father told me to ask you what you promised him on the terrace at Sofia’s wedding.”
His hands come off the steering wheel. He presses them flat against his thighs like he has to put them somewhere I can see.
“He asked me why I came back,” he says. “I told him I was terrified of him, and that I loved you more than I was afraid of him.”
“That was true.”
“Every word.” His jaw tightens. “That’s why it worked.”
He turns his head and looks at me. “He heard a man he could manage. He put his hand on my shoulder and invited me to Sunday dinner, family only, and I stood on that terrace afterward and understood that the fastest way into that house was to marry his daughter.”
The rain comes down harder on the roof.
“So that’s what I promised him,” Anthony says. “Nothing. I let your father believe I was harmless, and I did it with the truest thing I’ve ever said out loud.”
“You used loving me as cover.”
“Yes.”
“Then why couldn’t you stop it?” My voice comes out hoarse. “You went down there. You told them to pull it. Why didn’t that end it?”
“Because by the end it wasn’t mine to stop.
” He keeps his eyes on the windshield. “When I started, I was all of it. Everything they had came out of my hands. Then other people started talking, people who’d been too frightened to open their mouths until somebody else went first, and I’m the somebody who went first. By the time I walked in there to take it back, I was one name on a long list, and not one of those people was going to stop because I’d changed my mind. ”
The rain hammers the roof.
“It was mine to start,” he says. “It was never mine to stop. I lit the match. And then I watched everything burn - your father, you, every good thing I had.”
“Our first anniversary,” I say, and my voice cracks, gives out from under me.
“At the festa. I told you that you owed me a letter every anniversary for the rest of your life, because you never wrote back when we were sixteen. You wrote the first one on the back of a menu, and it said you were sorry for all of it, and I thought you meant the years you were gone.”
“I was apologizing for something you didn’t know existed.”
“And I dragged you up to the shed and thanked you for it.”
“Yes.” It’s barely there. “And that night, after you fell asleep, I wrote down what your father said to me in the piazza about the port. I need you to know every piece of it.”
“One more.” I can hear my own heartbeat over the rain. “And then I’m going to stop, because I don’t think I can carry any more of it tonight.”
“Ask me.”
“Our second date.” I have to raise my voice over the roof to say the worst sentence of my life. “There’s a line in your notes. Mentioned her mother, use this.”
Anthony makes a sound like he’s been hit in the chest.
“My mother, Anthony.” I turn in the seat so he has to look at me. “The woman whose perfume I still can’t smell in a shop without walking back out of it. You wrote use this beside her.”
“I know what I wrote.”
“Then explain it.”
“There isn’t an explanation.” His hands are locked on the wheel like it’s the only thing holding him together.
“You told me about the jasmine. About wearing it on the days you needed her close. And I went home and put it in a file, because I’d decided anything that got me nearer to your father was worth writing down, and I hadn’t let myself look straight at what that meant yet. ”
“Did you use it?”
The silence goes on long enough to be the answer.
“Say it out loud.”
“Yes.” It comes out of him in pieces. “The first time I told you I loved you, you were wearing it. I knew what day it was. I knew what she would have been to you that day, because you’d told me, because you trusted me with her.
” He’s crying and he doesn’t wipe his face.
“I picked the day, Alessia. Everything else I did, I did to your father and you were standing in the way of it. That one I did to you. That’s the one I’ll still be answering for when they put me in the ground. ”
I don’t say anything for a long time. The rain comes down. My relatives’ headlights keep sliding past the fogged glass.
“Thank you,” I say finally.
“For what?”
“For not pretending you didn’t understand the question.”
I turn away and press my forehead to the cold, streaming window.
I can’t look at him. I’m so angry I can’t feel my hands. I’m not going to get to keep any of it. That’s what I understand, sitting in a parked car with the rain coming down. Not the festa. Not the shed. Not one single Sunday.
But beneath all of it, God help me, there’s his cologne filling up the car. There’s the heat coming off his body across the console. There’s the sound of his breathing, ragged and uneven, and my body hasn’t gotten the news that I’m supposed to hate him.
My pulse is pounding between my legs. I can feel the ache of wanting him, sharp and insistent, even now. Even after everything.
I hate myself for it.
When I turn back, he’s closer than he was before.
I don’t know who moved. Maybe both of us. Maybe neither. The space between us has collapsed somehow, and his face is inches from mine, and I can see the rain caught in his eyelashes, the stubble along his jaw, the way his lips are parted like he’s forgotten how to close them.
Neither of us is breathing right.
“Don’t,” I whisper. But I don’t move away.
His hand lifts, slowly, like he’s giving me time to stop him. He hovers beside my face without touching. Close enough that I can feel the heat of his palm against my cheek.
“Tell me to stop.” His voice is wrecked. “Tell me, and I will.”
I should. I know I should. But my body is leaning toward him like it’s forgotten everything my mind knows, and his eyes drop to my mouth, and mine drop to his, and the rain is so loud on the roof that it sounds like the whole world is falling apart around us.
“Alessia,” he whispers, and my name sounds like it hurts him to say it. Like it’s a prayer he’s not allowed to finish.
A white flash explodes through the windshield.
Then another. A man in a rain slicker is standing in front of the hood with a camera, shooting straight through the glass at our faces six inches apart. The flash goes off again and again, blinding, relentless.
I shove myself back against my door. Anthony throws his arm across me instinctively, shielding me from the lens, and the photographer is already running for a car idling at the curb. His engine roars as he pulls away, taillights disappearing into the rain.
“Tomorrow,” Anthony says hoarsely, still breathing hard, “we’re going to be on the front page.”
I don’t answer. I’m still shaking, and I don’t know if it’s from rage or grief or the ghost of a kiss that didn’t happen.
I open the door and step back out into the rain.