24. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - Six Weeks After the Arrest
The photograph is on the front page of the paper someone left on the counter of the tasting room.
Me and Anthony in his car, our faces inches apart through the fogged glass.
The rain streaking down the windows. The heat between us visible even in a photograph.
The headline asks if the Sartori heiress has forgiven her husband, and there’s a whole paragraph speculating about reconciliation, about what it means that I took his hand at Mass, about whether I’m a victim or an accomplice or something in between.
My two employees are pretending not to have read it.
They’re very interested in inventory suddenly, counting bottles that have already been counted twice.
The woman browsing the Barolos has definitely read it, and she keeps glancing at me over the shelves like she’s hoping to witness something dramatic.
This room is the only place that feels like mine anymore.
Eighty square feet on a side street in the West Village, a zinc counter, and my grandmother’s name on the door in gold leaf that cost more than the lease deserved.
It took me a year to find it and four months to talk the landlord into me.
It’s the only thing I have that my father’s money never touched.
My mother’s family label is on the wall behind the register - the one Anthony helped me bring back. I’m polishing glasses that are already clean, trying to focus on the familiar weight of them in my hands, when the back door opens and he walks in through the stockroom.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say without turning around. “There are people outside.”
“That’s why I came through the alley.”
He stops on the other side of the counter and doesn’t come any closer. He looks terrible. There are dark circles under his eyes, his hair is uncombed, and his clothes are rumpled like he slept in them, or didn’t sleep at all.
“I need to tell you something before you read it somewhere else.”
The glass in my hand goes still.
“Tomorrow, the papers are going to publish pages of my notes. From the Sunday dinners.” He swallows hard, his throat working. “They got them from someone connected to the case. It’s what your father said at the table. And what I wrote down around it.”
“About me?”
“Some of it.”
I set the glass down. My hands are steadier than they should be. “How much?”
“Enough.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.” He drags a hand down his face. “I know it’s not.”
“Then give me one.”
His eyes lift to mine, and there’s something raw in them. Something flayed open. “There are things in those notes that I never wanted you to see. Things I wrote when I was-” He stops. Starts again. “When I was someone I don’t know how to explain to you.”
“Try.”
“I can’t.” His voice cracks on it. “Not because I won’t. Because there’s no version of it that doesn’t make you look at me the way you’re looking at me right now.”
“And how am I looking at you?”
“Like I’m already gone.”
The words hang between us. I don’t deny it.
“Read it to me,” I say.
“Alessia-”
“You clearly memorized it.” My voice rises, sharp and brittle. “You’ve been carrying it around in your head since you found out they had it. So read it to me.”
His jaw works. He looks at the floor, then at the wall, then back at me like he’s hoping I’ll change my mind. I don’t.
“Read it.”
He closes his eyes.
“A. mentioned the cellar key is kept in the kitchen drawer,” he recites quietly. “Confirm Sunday.”
The woman by the Barolos has stopped pretending to shop. One of my employees has frozen with a case of wine in her arms, her mouth slightly open.
I think about that Sunday.
I think about sitting on the kitchen counter with my bare feet swinging, telling my husband a funny story about my father losing his keys.
Laughing about how disorganized Papa was, how he could never remember where he put anything.
Anthony had smiled and kissed my forehead and asked where the spare was kept, and I’d told him, because why wouldn’t I?
He was my husband. There was nothing I wouldn’t have told him.
And then he went home and wrote it down.
The silence stretches out between us, thick and unbearable.
“Why are you telling me this?” My voice comes out strange, hollow.
“Because I promised you no more locked drawers.” There’s nothing left in his voice at all. “Because you should get to decide where you are when it lands, instead of reading it over your coffee.”
“So this is you being noble.”
“This is me being honest.” He swallows. “And this time it’s costing me everything.”
“You told me first so you could feel honest.” I pick the glass back up, just to have something in my hands. Something I can control. “You don’t get to warn me about the bomb after you’re the one who built it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to protect me from the thing you did.”
“I know.” His voice breaks. “I’m not trying to protect you. I’m trying to-” He stops. Breathes. “I don’t know what I’m trying to do. I just couldn’t let you find out from a stranger. I couldn’t let you be alone when you saw it.”
“I am alone.” I set the glass down very carefully, because otherwise I’ll throw it at his head.
“That’s what you did, Anthony. You made me alone in my own marriage.
You made me alone in my own family. You made me alone at my mother’s memorial Mass.
So don’t stand there and tell me you couldn’t let me be alone.
I’ve been alone since the day I met you. I just didn’t know it.”
He flinches like I’ve hit him. Good.
“Get out.”
He doesn’t move.
“Get out of my mother’s store.”
“Alessia.” His voice is wrecked, scraped down to nothing. “Please. I know I don’t deserve-”
“You’re right. You don’t.”
“-anything from you. I know that. But please don’t make me leave like this. Not with you looking at me like-” He stops. Swallows. “Like there’s nothing left.”
“Maybe there isn’t.”
The words land between us like a door slamming shut.
He stands there for a long moment, his chest rising and falling unevenly, his hands still pressed flat against my counter. Then something in his face crumples - just for a second, just long enough for me to see it - before he pulls it back together.
“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay.”
He goes. He doesn’t push back, doesn’t try to explain, doesn’t ask again. The back door swings shut behind him, and I stand there with every eye in the room on me, my hands flat on the counter and my heart pounding so hard it hurts.
I don’t let myself cry until I’ve turned to face the wall.
My mother’s label is right in front of my face. Beside it, pinned to the corkboard, is the calendar my assistant keeps. A date almost three months out is circled in her pink pen, with a note in my own handwriting from last year.
Anniversary. He owes me a letter.