30. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - After
The courthouse steps are a wall of cameras.
They’re everywhere - on the sidewalk, on the steps, crowded behind barricades that barely contain them.
Reporters shout questions at anyone who passes, and the flashes go off in a constant, blinding strobe.
I can feel them tracking me the moment I step out of the car, can feel the weight of all those lenses swinging in my direction.
I stand at the bottom of the steps with Euridice on one side of me and Anthony on the other.
I’ve decided not to go inside. I don’t need to hear the words from a stranger in a robe, don’t need to sit in that courtroom and watch my father’s face while his fate is read aloud. I only need to see him when he comes out. I only need to look him in the eye one more time.
The crowd presses against the barricades. Someone shouts my name. I keep my face forward, my spine straight, my hand wrapped around Anthony’s.
The word travels down the steps before my father does.
It passes from a reporter’s earpiece to the crowd and from the crowd to us, rippling through the mass of people like a stone dropped in still water. I hear it in fragments first - guilty, someone says, and then all counts, and then the roar swells and everyone is talking at once.
Guilty. All counts.
Euridice’s hand finds mine. I hold on to both of them - her on one side, my husband on the other - and I wait for something to hit me. Grief, maybe. Relief. Rage. Something.
I don’t feel anything yet.
When they bring Papa out through a side door toward the waiting van, the crowd surges.
Every camera swings to catch him, and the flashes intensify until it’s almost impossible to see.
He’s in a suit again - they must have let him change out of the jumpsuit for the verdict - and his hands are cuffed in front of him.
He walks like a king going to a coronation instead of a cell.
Head high. Shoulders back. That particular Sartori pride that I used to admire and now can barely look at.
Halfway to the van, he turns his head.
Across forty feet of shouting people and flashing cameras, he finds me. His dark eyes move from my face to Anthony beside me, and then down to our joined hands.
Then he stops walking.
A guard pulls at his elbow. He doesn’t move. Even now, cuffed, with his wrists in front of him and forty cameras on his face, Domenico Sartori can still make other people wait.
“Alessia.”
His voice carries across the whole width of the steps. The reporters stop shouting to catch it, and the street goes quiet enough that I can hear the shutters going.
“Everything I did, I did so that you would never have to want for anything,” he says. “The house. The name. The table you sat at every Sunday of your life. All of it was going to be yours.”
He looks at Anthony. He takes his time about it, the way a man looks at something he’s measuring.
“Instead you’ve chosen a man who can give you the truth and nothing else.” His smile is thin and terrible. “Enjoy your honesty, figlia mia. It’s very cold in an empty house.”
“Then I’ll be cold,” I tell him.
I say it loud enough for the cameras, and I feel Anthony’s hand close hard around mine.
Papa looks at me for a long moment.
He nods once.
It’s the nod he gives the waiter when the wine is acceptable. The nod that says this will do. The nod that dismisses everything it acknowledges.
Goodbye, figlia mia.
I don’t cry. I spent all my tears for him months ago.
The van doors slam shut. The engine rumbles to life.
And just like that, my father is gone, not dead, but gone from my life in every way that matters.
I watch the van pull away from the curb and disappear around the corner, and I feel the last thread connecting me to my childhood snap and fall away.
The crowd breaks around us. People are moving in every direction - reporters chasing the van, spectators dispersing, family members hugging and crying on the steps. In the chaos, I see a familiar figure pushing through the bodies like a battleship in black.
Zia Carmela.
She’s heading straight for Anthony, her face twisted with rage, her hand already raised.
The slap cracks across his face so hard his head turns.
The cameras go wild. Flashes explode from every direction, capturing the moment from a dozen angles. Anthony doesn’t raise a hand. He doesn’t step back or defend himself. He just stands there with his cheek flaming red and takes it.
Carmela pulls her arm back to do it again.
I step in front of him.
“You’ll have to go through me,” I tell her.
The whole family is behind her, my cousins and my aunts and uncles, everyone who whispered through the Mass, everyone who watched me walk down the aisle to take his hand. They’re staring at me like I’ve grown a second head.
Carmela’s eyes narrow. “You’re choosing him,” she hisses. “Over your own blood.”
“My own blood killed a man.” My voice doesn’t waver.
I don’t lower it, and I know the cameras are catching every word.
Let them. Let the whole world hear this.
“My own blood sat that man’s nephew at our table and told me it was love.
I’m done letting anyone choose for me. Not Papa. Not you. Not him.”
I feel Anthony go still behind me.
“I’m choosing,” I say. “This is me, choosing.”
Carmela stares at me for a long moment. Her face cycles through emotions - fury, disbelief, and finally something that might be grief. For the niece she’s losing, maybe. For the family that will never be the same.
Then she turns around and walks away.
After a second, the rest of the family follows her. My cousins, my uncles, the aunts who used to pinch my cheeks and tell me I was beautiful. They file past me without a word, without a glance, closing ranks around Carmela like I’m already dead to them.
Euridice squeezes my hand.
She doesn’t go with them.
Anthony’s cheek is flaming red where Carmela hit him. He’s looking at me like he doesn’t know whether he’s allowed to breathe.
“Take me to the vineyard,” I say. “I want to go home.”