4. Cassandra
— ? —
Cassandra
The dress is wrong.
I’ve known it since I put it on an hour ago, but I keep standing in front of the mirror anyway, tugging at the neckline like that’s going to fix anything.
It’s a beautiful dress - midnight blue, Italian silk, the kind of thing I used to wear on runways before I traded all of that for a villa in Rome and a husband who’s never home.
But beautiful isn’t the same as right, and tonight I need to be right.
Tonight is the promotional event for Antonio’s film. Red carpet, photographers, the whole machine that I married into and never quite learned to navigate. He asked me to come. Actually asked, for the first time in months, looking at me over breakfast with something almost like hope in his eyes.
“It would mean a lot,” he said. “Having you there.”
So here I am. Dressed up and nervous and trying to remember how to be a movie star’s wife in public.
My phone buzzes on the vanity. A text from Antonio: Car’s here. You ready?
I slip the brass token into my clutch - I’ve been carrying it since he gave it to me, a small piece of us tucked close.
Not even close.
Coming down, I type back, and I take one last look at the woman in the mirror - thirty-two years old, former model, current nobody - before I turn off the light and go.
***
The red carpet is exactly as overwhelming as I remember.
Lights everywhere, so bright they leave spots in my vision.
The roar of photographers shouting names, trying to get attention, a wall of sound that hits you the second you step out of the car.
Antonio takes my hand as we emerge, and for a moment - just a moment - I feel like we’re a team. Like we’re us.
“You look incredible,” he murmurs, close to my ear.
“I look terrified.”
“That too.” He squeezes my hand. “Stay close. I’ve got you.”
We walk the carpet together, stopping at the marks the publicist indicated, smiling for cameras that flash so fast they blur into a single strobe.
Antonio is good at this. He knows exactly how to angle his body, when to wave, how to give them the shot they want without looking like he’s trying. I used to be good at it too. Before I stopped being the one they were photographing.
“Antonio! Over here!”
“Give us a smile!”
“Cassandra, to the left!”
That last one surprises me. Someone actually said my name. I turn toward the voice, trying to find the photographer who remembered I exist, and that’s when I feel a hand on my elbow.
“Signora Guerriero.” The publicist - Mara, I think, or maybe Marina - appears at my side with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “We need Antonio for some solo shots. Would you mind stepping aside for just a moment?”
“I - sure. Of course.”
She guides me off the carpet with practiced efficiency, depositing me behind a velvet rope where a handful of other plus-ones are already waiting. I watch Antonio turn back, looking for me, his brow furrowing when he realizes I’m gone.
Then Bianca Fioravanti steps into the space I just vacated.
She’s wearing red. Of course she is.
A gown that fits her like it was sewn directly onto her body, her dark hair swept up to show off diamond earrings that catch the light with every turn of her head. She glides up to Antonio like she belongs there, like this was always the plan, and the photographers go absolutely wild.
“Antonio! Bianca! Together!”
“Give us the chemistry!”
“Over here, over here!”
I watch my husband smile for the cameras with another woman at his side.
He looks uncomfortable. I can see it in the set of his shoulders, the slight tension around his eyes. He keeps glancing toward the rope where I’m standing, like he’s trying to find me in the crowd.
But Bianca is right there, leaning into him, her hand on his arm, and the photographers are eating it up, and no one is looking at the wife behind the velvet rope.
The whole thing lasts maybe ninety seconds. Then the publicist sweeps them both inside and the next couple takes their place on the carpet, and I’m left standing alone in a midnight blue dress that was definitely, absolutely wrong.
***
The rest of the event is a blur of small talk and champagne I don’t drink.
Antonio finds me eventually, apologetic and distracted, but we keep getting separated by people who want his attention - producers, directors, journalists with questions about the film. Every conversation includes Bianca somehow. Every introduction pairs them together like they’re a matching set.
“Antonio and Bianca, the heart of the film.”
“Our two leads, absolutely electric together.”
“You must be so proud of your husband, signora. He and Bianca have created something truly special.”
I smile. I nod. I say the right things and shake the right hands and count the minutes until I can go home and take off this dress and stop pretending that any of this is fine.
By the time we leave, I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. Antonio is quiet in the car, his hand finding mine in the dark, and I let him hold it because I don’t have the energy to pull away.
“I’m sorry,” he says, as Rome slides past the windows. “Tonight was…”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. They shouldn’t have moved you like that.”
“But they did.” I turn to look at him, his face half-lit by passing streetlights. “They did, Antonio. And you stood there with her while I watched from behind a rope.”
“I didn’t know where you’d gone. I was looking for you…”
“I know.” I’m too tired to fight about this. Too tired to do anything but state the facts and let them sit between us. “I know you were looking. But she was right there. And I was somewhere else. And that’s how it’s going to look in every photo from tonight.”
He doesn’t have an answer for that.
We ride the rest of the way in silence.
***
The next morning, I wake up alone.
This isn’t surprising anymore. Antonio left for set hours ago - I vaguely remember him kissing my forehead in the dark, murmuring something about an early call. The bed is cold on his side. The house is quiet in that particular way that means I’m the only person in it.
I make coffee. I eat toast I don’t taste. And then, because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment, I open my laptop and look at the photos from last night.
They’re everywhere.
Every entertainment site, every gossip blog, every social media account that covers Italian cinema. And in every single photo - every single one - I’m either cropped out entirely or reduced to a sliver of midnight blue at the edge of the frame.
Antonio Guerriero and Bianca Fioravanti Dazzle at Promotional Gala.
Co-Stars Heat Up the Red Carpet.
Italy’s Hottest New Couple? Fans Can’t Get Enough.
There’s one photo that’s particularly brutal.
It’s the moment right after I was moved, the moment Bianca stepped in beside him.
She’s looking up at Antonio with this expression of pure adoration, and he’s looking down at her, and if you didn’t know better - if you didn’t know he was searching the crowd for his wife - you’d think they were seconds away from kissing.
In the corner of the frame, barely visible, there’s a shoulder in midnight blue.
That’s me. That’s all that’s left of me.
I close the laptop harder than necessary and press my hands against my eyes, trying to breathe through the tightness in my chest. I will not cry. I will not give this stupid machine the satisfaction of making me cry.
My phone rings.
The name on the screen makes me pause:
Odette Laurent. My oldest friend, from the LA days, from before Antonio, from a version of myself I sometimes forget existed.
We haven’t talked in months. Not since she moved back to Italy for a modeling assignment in Milan - some luxury brand campaign that’s kept her busy - and our calls got lost in the shuffle of her new life and my crumbling one.
I answer anyway.
“Cass.” Her voice is warm and familiar and exactly what I need right now - Odette Laurent, my oldest friend, the girl I grew up with before either of us knew what a runway was. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you actually picked up.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“Rude. Incredibly rude. This is why I never call.”
“You never call because you’re terrible at keeping in touch. You’ve been terrible since we were twelve.”
“Also true.” I can hear her smiling through the phone. “How are you? I saw the photos from the gala and I thought, I should check on her. That looked brutal.”
“You saw the photos?”
“Everyone saw the photos. They’re all over my feed.”
Of course they are. The whole world gets to watch me be erased from my own marriage.
“I’m fine,” I say, and it comes out less convincing than I intended.
“Liar. You’re a terrible liar. You’ve always been a terrible liar.” Odette pauses. “Talk to me. What’s going on? And don’t say ‘nothing,’ because I know what nothing looks like and this isn’t it.”
So I talk.
I tell her about the anniversary Antonio missed.
About the call I overheard and the explanation that didn’t quite explain anything. About the way I’ve been disappearing by inches, cropped out of photos and sidelined at events and treated like a footnote in my own husband’s story.
I tell her about Bianca - how I try not to be paranoid, how Antonio swears there’s nothing happening, how I want to believe him but the evidence keeps piling up in ways I can’t ignore.
“He says she’s just work,” I finish. “He says the press makes it into something it’s not.”
“And you believe him?”
“I want to believe him.”
“Still not the same thing.”
“I know.”
Odette is quiet for a moment. I can picture her on the other end of the line, probably curled up on some designer couch in her Milan apartment, processing everything I’ve just dumped on her.
“You know what I think?” she says finally. “I think you’ve been alone in that house too long. I think you’ve forgotten what it feels like to have someone in your corner. And I think you need to stop waiting for him to show up and start showing up for yourself.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means you used to have a life, Cass. Before him. You used to have dreams and ambitions and things you wanted that had nothing to do with being someone’s wife. What happened to the atelier idea? The one you used to sketch plans for on napkins at every brunch we ever had?”
The atelier. I haven’t thought about that in years.
“That was just a fantasy,” I say.
“So? Fantasies can become real if you let them.”
I don’t have an answer for that. The idea feels too big, too far away, like something that belongs to a different version of me.
“Look,” Odette says, “I’m not telling you to leave him. I’m not telling you to stay. I’m telling you to remember that you’re a person, not just a supporting character in the Antonio Guerriero show. Whatever happens with your marriage, you need something that’s yours.”
My laptop pings. An email notification.
“Hold on,” I tell her. “Something just came in.”
I open the laptop and click on the message. It’s from Antonio’s publicist - the one who moved me aside last night - forwarding an invitation to an industry dinner later this week. Directors, producers, financiers. The people who make Italian cinema run.
Signor Guerriero has requested your attendance, the email says. Please confirm at your earliest convenience.
He requested me. He actually asked for me to be there.
“Cass?” Odette’s voice comes through the phone. “You still there?”
“Yeah.” I stare at the invitation, weighing it in my mind. “I just got invited to a dinner. Industry thing. Antonio asked them to include me.”
“Are you going to go?”
Last night I was a cropped shoulder at the edge of a photo. Last night I stood behind a velvet rope and watched another woman take my place.
But he asked for me to be there. He’s trying, in his way.
And maybe I need to try too.
Maybe I need to walk into that room and be his wife in front of all those people, instead of hiding in this empty house and watching my marriage dissolve from a distance.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think I am.”