5. Cassandra
— ? —
Cassandra
The restaurant is so exclusive it doesn’t have a name on the door.
I had to give the driver the address three times before he believed me - a narrow side street near Trastevere, the kind of place you’d walk right past if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
But there’s a man in a beautiful suit standing at the entrance, checking names against a list, and when I give him mine, he smiles and gestures me inside like I belong here.
I don’t belong here. But I’m going to pretend I do.
The interior is all warm lighting and exposed brick, tables arranged to encourage intimacy, waiters moving through the room with the kind of grace that comes from years of practice.
I spot Antonio immediately - he’s at a large table near the back, surrounded by men in expensive suits, and he lights up when he sees me coming.
“Cass.” He stands, pulling out the chair beside him. “You came.”
“You asked me to.”
“I know. I just…” He pauses, something vulnerable flickering across his face. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I sit down and let him pour me a glass of wine, trying to orient myself in the room.
The faces around the table are mostly familiar from magazine covers and film credits - directors whose work I’ve admired, producers who’ve probably never heard my name.
And across from Antonio, elegant and composed in a dress that probably cost more than my first car, Bianca Fioravanti.
She catches my eye and smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes.
“Cassandra,” she says, her voice carrying easily across the table. “How lovely that you could join us. Antonio mentioned you might not make it.”
“Did he?”
“Something about you being tired after the gala.” She tilts her head sympathetically. “Those events can be so draining, can’t they? Especially if you’re not used to them anymore.”
The dig lands exactly where she intended it to. I feel Antonio stiffen beside me.
“I’m fine,” I say, keeping my voice light. “Just happy to be here.”
The conversation moves on, but the tone has been set. I am an outsider at this table.
A guest in a room full of people who all know each other, who all speak the same language of projects and financing and release dates. They’re polite enough when they remember I exist, but mostly they don’t remember.
Mostly they talk around me, through me, like I’m furniture.
Antonio tries. I can see him trying - angling his body toward me, including me in explanations of inside jokes, touching my hand under the table. But he keeps getting pulled into other conversations, other directions, and I keep getting left behind.
“So, Antonio,” one of the producers says, leaning forward with the eager energy of someone about to make a deal, “tell us about the villa scene. The one with the rain. I heard it was chaos on set.”
“It was a nightmare.” Antonio laughs, shaking his head. “The rain machines malfunctioned twice, and by the third take we were all soaking wet and the crew was about to mutiny…”
“Oh, it wasn’t that bad.” Bianca’s voice cuts in smoothly. “You’re exaggerating. The second malfunction was barely a drizzle.”
“A drizzle that shorted out half the lighting rig.”
“True, but we got the shot, didn’t we? That last take…
” She turns to the table, commanding attention effortlessly.
“That last take was magic. Antonio was so in the moment that when the rain hit, he just… stayed in it. Didn’t flinch, didn’t break character.
The director called cut and he just stood there, still Marco, still in the scene.
I had to actually shake him to bring him back. ”
The table laughs. Antonio laughs too, ducking his head in that self-deprecating way he has.
“She’s exaggerating,” he says.
“I’m really not.” Bianca grins at him. “You were completely gone. I was worried for a second.”
“That’s called acting. You should try it sometime.”
More laughter. The easy rhythm of two people who’ve spent months working together, who share references and memories that I’m not part of. I watch Bianca reach across the table to swat at Antonio’s arm, watch him duck away with a smile, and I feel something cold settle in my chest.
This is what it looks like from the outside. This is what the world sees.
“Cassandra.” The voice comes from my left - an older man with silver hair and kind eyes, one of the producers whose name I’ve already forgotten. “Antonio tells me you used to model. In America, yes?”
“In LA. A lifetime ago.”
“You must miss it. The glamour, the excitement.”
I think about early call times and impossible diets and the constant pressure to be thinner, younger, more. “Not really,” I say honestly. “It was work. Good work, sometimes, but still work.”
“And now? What do you do now?”
The question lands like a punch. What do I do now? I wake up alone in a house that echoes. I wait for a husband who’s never coming home. I read comment sections that tell me I don’t deserve him and wonder if they’re right.
“I’m… figuring that out,” I say.
The producer nods politely and turns to talk to someone more interesting, and I’m left alone with my wine and the growing certainty that I shouldn’t have come.
The dinner stretches on. Course after course of food I can barely taste, conversation after conversation that flows around me like water around a stone.
Antonio keeps trying to pull me in, but every time he does, someone else demands his attention - a question about the film, a story that needs telling, Bianca with another anecdote about their time on set.
By dessert, I’ve stopped trying to participate.
I just sit there, watching my husband be charming and present for everyone in the room except me, and I think about what Odette said on the phone. You’re a person, not just a supporting character in the Antonio Guerriero show.
But sitting here, invisible at a table full of people who don’t see me, I’m not sure I believe that anymore.
***
The ride home is quiet.
Antonio reaches for my hand in the car, and I let him take it, too tired to pull away. He’s watching me with that worried expression he gets sometimes, the one that means he knows he’s messed up but doesn’t know how to fix it.
“Tonight was hard,” he says finally.
“Tonight was fine.”
“Cass.”
“It was.” I turn to look at him, his profile caught in the dashboard glow.
“I sat at a table full of people who make movies with you, and barely anyone spoke to me. I listened to Bianca finish your stories like she knows you better than I do. I watched everyone assume you two are together and no one bother to correct them.”
“I corrected them.”
“When? When did you correct them?”
He opens his mouth, then closes it again. I watch him search for an example and come up empty.
“I should have done more,” he says quietly. “I know that. I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I keep meaning it.”
The car pulls up to the villa. I get out before he can open my door, walking up the path to the entrance with my heels clicking on the stone. Antonio follows, his keys jangling as he unlocks the door, and we step into the house together.
It’s dark inside. Quiet. The same house I’ve been rattling around in for months, feeling like a ghost in my own life.
“Cass, wait.” Antonio catches my arm as I head for the stairs. “Please. Talk to me.”
“And say what? What is there to say that we haven’t already said?”
“I don’t know.” He sounds lost. “I just… I don’t want us to go to bed angry. Not again.”
I look at him. My husband. The man I fell in love with in a coffee shop in LA, who made me laugh so hard I forgot to be nervous, who asked me to marry him on a balcony in Florence with the city spread out below us like a promise.
I think about all the years between then and now, all the distance that’s grown up between us, and I feel something crack open in my chest.
“I’m not angry,” I say. “I’m sad. It’s worse.”
“What would make it better? Tell me and I’ll do it.”
“I don’t know if you can.”
“Let me try. Please.”
He looks so desperate. So genuinely, completely desperate to fix this thing that’s been breaking for a year. And I’m so tired of fighting, so tired of being hurt, so tired of sleeping alone in a bed built for two.
“Just…” I step closer. “Just be here. Right now. With me. Not on set, not thinking about the film, not trying to figure out what to say. Just… here.”
“I’m here,” he says softly. “I’m right here.”
I reach for him.