26. Anthony
— ? —
Anthony
Now - Our Anniversary, Four Months After the Arrest
I’ve written her a letter every anniversary of our marriage, and I’m not going to stop now because she’s stopped reading them.
The pen feels heavy in my hand. I’ve been sitting at the desk in my hotel room for hours, staring at blank paper, trying to find words that don’t exist. How do you apologize for something this big?
How do you explain that you used someone and loved them at the same time, and that you still don’t know where one ended and the other began?
The first draft is garbage. I crumple it and throw it at the wastebasket and miss, and it joins the small mountain of failures accumulating on the carpet beside the desk.
The second draft is worse - too defensive, too full of explanations that sound like excuses even to my own ears.
The third makes me want to set the whole room on fire and myself along with it.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until I see stars.
Four months. Four months of this hotel room with its neutral walls and its minibar I haven’t touched and its bed that’s too big for one person.
Four months of waking up in the middle of the night reaching for a body that isn’t there, my hand finding cold sheets instead of warm skin.
Four months of watching the news cycle chew through my family’s name and spit it out, and knowing I’m the one who fed it to them.
Four months of silence from the only person whose voice I want to hear.
I think about the corridor outside that ballroom.
The way her body pressed against mine before her mind caught up.
The way she kissed me like she was drowning and I was air, and then shoved me so hard I went through a rack of chairs.
The sound she made when she saw my hand on her back - not pleasure, not anger, but something worse.
Recognition. She looked at my hand and saw it holding a pen, writing use this next to her dead mother’s name.
I let her go. I stood in that corridor surrounded by fallen chairs and I let her walk away from me, because what was I supposed to do?
Hold her there? Explain myself while she was half-undressed and shaking with something that looked like grief and fury tangled together so tight even she couldn’t tell them apart?
I would have. God help me, I would have said anything to keep her in that hallway.
That’s exactly why I didn’t.
Twelve pages. That’s how long it takes before I stop trying to make myself look better and just tell the truth.
Alessia,
Every year I’ve written that I love you, and every year it was true, and every year I left out the rest. So here is the rest.
I wish I could tell you that you were never a means to an end. It would be cleaner. But you were. I used Sunday dinners to gather information. I used our marriage to get into your father’s cellar and his study and his confidence. I used your love to stand close to the man who killed my uncle.
And I loved you. Desperately, from the second I turned around on that balcony.
I don’t know how to make those two things fit together.
I’ve spent every night since the arrest trying.
The truth is that I did both. I used you, and I loved you, and I told myself one canceled out the other. It never did.
My hand is shaking. The words on the page blur and swim, and I have to set the pen down and breathe through the tightness in my chest before I can continue.
The only thing I can tell you that might matter is this: by the end, you were the only thing I cared about. Not justice, not my uncle, not revenge.
I want to be accurate about the morning of the arrest, because you have had enough of my careful sentences to last you a lifetime.
I drove to that station to take my name off it.
It would not have saved your father. Moore had already told me so to my face, in that chair, three days before, and I got in the car anyway.
I have let you believe I was driving toward some other ending where he walked free and I still had you.
There was no such ending. There hasn’t been one since the spring.
What I was driving toward was the right to say I tried, and a clean house, and the chance to tell you the truth myself before the entire world told you instead. I was too late for all three.
I chose too late. I know that. But I chose.
I’m not asking you to forgive me for what I did. I’m asking you to believe me about who I became.
I’ll love you until they bury me.
Anthony
I fold the pages carefully, slide them into an envelope, and write her name on the front. My handwriting looks like a stranger’s - unsteady, almost desperate.
The walk to Euridice’s building takes twenty minutes. I could take a cab, but I need the air. I need the cold biting at my face and the noise of the city drowning out the voice in my head that keeps asking what the hell I think I’m doing.
Euridice hates me. She’s made that clear in every interaction we’ve had since the arrest. She’s been Alessia’s shield, absorbing all the calls and the questions and the attempts at contact and giving back nothing but silence and contempt.
She’s also the only door I have left.
I’ve thought about showing up at the wine shop.
I’ve driven past it six times in the last month, slowing down at the corner, looking through the window for a glimpse of dark hair and familiar shoulders.
I never stop. She asked me to stay away from her mother’s store, and it’s the one thing I can give her that costs me something.
So Euridice it is.
She’s waiting for me in the lobby of her building before I’ve even made it past the doorman.
She’s in workout clothes with her arms crossed, her dark hair pulled back severely, and the look on her face could curdle milk at fifty paces.
She’s clearly been watching the street from upstairs, waiting to intercept me before I can make it to the elevator.
“You have a lot of nerve,” she says, loud enough for the doorman and the woman collecting her mail to hear every word. “Two front pages since this whole thing started, Anthony. First your notes on her father, and now this.”
The tabloids had a field day with that one.
SARTORI HEIRESS FLEES ESTRANGED HUSBAND’S HOTEL IN TEARS.
They got a shot of her face, mascara streaked, mouth twisted with something that could have been rage or grief or both.
I bought every copy I could find and burned them in the sink of my hotel bathroom, which accomplished exactly nothing except setting off the smoke alarm.
“I told her before it ran,” I say. “The notes. I warned her.”
“Congratulations. Do you want a medal?” She holds out her hand, palm up, fingers beckoning. “Give it to me before I have you thrown out.”
I don’t move. “I want to give it to her myself.”
“And I want a time machine so I can go back and tell my cousin not to marry a man who writes access to inner circle in the margin of their wedding certificate.” Her voice is sharp enough to cut glass. “We don’t always get what we want.”
The words land exactly where she means them to. I feel them in my chest like a physical blow.
“Euridice.” I keep my voice low, steady, even though nothing inside me is steady. “I know you hate me. I know you have every reason to. But it’s our anniversary, and I wrote her a letter, and I need her to have it.”
“You need.” She laughs, and there’s no humor in it at all.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? Everything you need.
You needed justice for your uncle, so you used my cousin.
You needed access to her father, so you married her.
You needed to feel like a good person, so you tried to pull the case at the last second and then got to tell everyone you tried.
” She takes a step closer, and her voice drops to something venomous.
“What about what she needs? Have you thought about that even once?”
“It’s all I think about.”
“Then leave her alone.”
“I can’t.”
The words come out rawer than I intend. I watch Euridice’s expression flicker - not softening, exactly, but shifting into something more complicated than pure hostility.
“She has nightmares,” she says quietly. “About the files. About her father, and about drawers that won’t stop opening. She wakes up screaming your name, and I don’t think it’s because she misses you.”
My throat closes. “I know.”
“You don’t know anything. You don’t know what it’s like to watch her like this.
You don’t know what it’s like to hear her crying in my guest room at three in the morning and not be able to do anything about it.
” Her jaw tightens. “She’s my best friend.
She’s been my best friend since we were children. And you broke her.”
“I’m trying to-”
“You’re trying to make yourself feel better.
” She cuts me off without raising her voice.
“You’re trying to prove you’re not the monster she found in that drawer.
But you don’t get to use me for that, Anthony.
I’m not your messenger. I’m not your bridge back to her.
I’m the person who holds her hair back when the panic attacks make her sick, and I am not on your side. ”
I stand there on the marble floor of her building’s lobby with my wife’s letter in my hand and absolutely nothing to say.
She’s right. She’s right about all of it, and I hate her for being right, and I hate myself more for making her right.
“Please.” The word scrapes out of me like broken glass. “Just give her the letter. She doesn’t have to read it. She doesn’t have to respond. I just need her to know that I remember. That I’m still here. That I haven’t stopped-”
I can’t finish. My voice gives out, and I’m standing in a lobby in front of a woman who despises me, trying not to fall apart in public.
“I’ve watched her take your ring out of her coat pocket for four months and put it back every single time.” Euridice’s voice is quieter now, stripped of the venom. “I’ve never told her I’ve seen it. I’m telling you because apparently somebody in this disaster needs to say something true out loud.”
Euridice watches me struggle. Her expression doesn’t change, but something in her posture shifts - a microscopic relaxation of her shoulders, a slight unclenching of her jaw.
“She’s going to a gala tonight. The children’s hospital benefit. She says she’s done hiding in my apartment and letting my mother tell the whole family she’s too ashamed to show her face.”
My heart stops. “At the hotel?”
“Same hotel.” Euridice tucks the letter into her waistband and turns for the elevator. Over her shoulder, she adds: “Same balcony, Anthony. Do with that whatever you want.”
The elevator doors close behind her, and I’m left standing in the lobby with the doorman watching me and my pulse pounding so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
Same hotel. Same balcony.
The place where I found her again after all those years.
The place where she asked me if I got her letters and I looked into her eyes and lied.
The place where I held her while she cried about years of silence and told myself it was for her own good, that the truth would only hurt her, that I was protecting her by keeping my secrets locked away.
I was protecting myself. I know that now. I was protecting the version of me she loved, the one who didn’t exist, the one I built out of half-truths and careful omissions and the desperate need to be worthy of the way she looked at me.
If she’s going to be there tonight, then so am I.
Not to force anything. Not to corner her or beg or make a scene. Just to be in the same room. Just to see her face across a crowd and know that she’s real, that we’re real, that whatever I destroyed isn’t completely gone.
I walk out of Euridice’s building into the gray afternoon light, and for the first time in four months, something that feels almost like hope uncurls in my chest.
It doesn’t feel like I deserve it.
I go anyway.