10. Antonio
— ? —
Antonio
Francesco doesn’t ask questions on the drive home.
He’s been my driver for three years, and he’s learned when to talk and when to let silence do its work.
Right now, silence is the only thing holding me together.
I’m slumped in the back seat of the car, fever still burning through my bones, watching Rome slide past the windows and trying to make sense of what just happened.
I’m filing for divorce.
Cassandra’s voice keeps playing on a loop in my head.
Not angry - I could have handled angry. Angry means she still cares enough to fight.
What I heard was something worse: a door closing.
A decision already made. The flat, final tone of a woman who has reached the end of her rope and found nothing left to hold onto.
She thinks Bianca and I-
No. She said she didn’t think I’d touched her. Not yet. But she felt replaced. In the small daily knowing of me. That’s what she said, and the words keep cutting deeper every time I replay them.
How did Bianca know I was sick? How did she know to be there, in my dressing room, playing nursemaid at the exact moment my wife walked in?
The text that summoned Cassandra, I didn’t send it. I know I didn’t send it. My phone was in my dressing room, and Gianni said…
Gianni said Bianca was in there. With my phone. Looking for a number.
The picture assembles itself slowly, like a photograph developing in acid. The months of Bianca learning my schedule. The way she always knew when I needed water, aspirin, a chair. The professional kindness I mistook for collegiality.
She wasn’t being helpful. She was gathering information. Building something.
But why? What does she gain from destroying my marriage?
“Signor Guerriero.” Francesco’s voice pulls me back to the present. “We’re here.”
I look up. The villa is dark except for a single light in the upstairs bedroom. Cassandra’s car is in the driveway.
She’s still here.
“Wait for me,” I tell Francesco, and I’m out of the car before he can respond.
The front door is unlocked. I push through it, calling her name, and the house feels wrong immediately - too quiet, too empty, the air charged with something I can’t name.
I take the stairs two at a time despite the fever that makes my legs feel like wet sand, and I reach the bedroom just as she’s zipping a suitcase on the bed.
Her side of the closet is bare.
“Cass.” I’m breathing hard, leaning against the doorframe for support. “Cass, please. Just - wait. Talk to me.”
“I said everything I needed to say at the studio.” She doesn’t look at me. Her movements are efficient, practiced - the motions of a woman who has been planning this, maybe for longer than tonight. “I’m going to my parents. I’ll have my lawyer contact yours about the paperwork.”
“This is insane. You can’t just - you can’t end a six-year marriage based on one staged scene.”
“One staged scene?” Now she does look at me, and her eyes are red-rimmed but dry. “Antonio, that scene was the last act of a very long play. I’ve been watching myself disappear for a year. The staged scene just made it impossible to keep pretending.”
“I didn’t stage anything. Bianca…”
“Stop.” She holds up a hand. “I don’t want to hear her name right now. I don’t want explanations or excuses or promises that won’t mean anything tomorrow. I want to get in my car and drive to Calabria and sleep in a bed that doesn’t feel like a monument to everything I’ve lost.”
“Then let me come with you.”
“Are you hearing yourself?” Her laugh is bitter, broken. “You can barely stand. You have a fever of god knows what. You shouldn’t even be out of bed, let alone planning a long drive to beg your way back into a marriage you’ve been neglecting for a year.”
“I know I’ve neglected you. I know I’ve been a terrible husband. But this - whatever you think you saw tonight…”
“I didn’t think I saw anything, Antonio.
I saw a woman with your head in her lap.
I saw intimacy that should have been mine.
I saw someone who knew you were sick when I didn’t, who was there when I should have been, who has somehow become the person who takes care of you while I sit alone in this house waiting for you to remember I exist.”
She picks up the suitcase and moves toward the door.
I don’t block her path - that’s not who I am, and even in my fever-addled state I know that physically preventing her from leaving would be the end of any chance I have.
Instead, I step aside, and as she passes me, I say the only thing I can think of.
“The text. The one that brought you to set. I didn’t send it.”
She pauses. Doesn’t turn around.
“Someone used my phone,” I continue, the words tumbling out. “Bianca was in my dressing room with it. Gianni saw her. She said she was looking for a number, but she was - I think she sent that message, Cass. I think she staged the whole thing.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It’s the truth. I don’t understand her motives. I don’t know what she wants or what she gains from this. But I know what I didn’t do. I didn’t send that text. I didn’t ask her to be there. I didn’t put my head in her lap - I was delirious with fever and I don’t even remember lying down.”
Cassandra turns to face me then, and for a moment I see something flicker in her expression - doubt, maybe, or the ghost of wanting to believe me. But then it’s gone, replaced by the same flat exhaustion I’ve been seeing for months.
“Even if that’s true,” she says quietly, “even if she engineered the whole thing, it doesn’t change the underlying fact.
She knew you were sick, Antonio. She knew before I did.
She’s been paying attention to you in ways I haven’t been allowed to, because you’ve been giving all your attention to the work. To her. To anything that isn’t me.”
“That’s going to change.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I mean it this time.”
“You’ve said that too.”
She walks down the stairs, and I follow, gripping the banister to keep from falling. In the entryway, she sets down her suitcase and turns to face me one more time.
“I’m leaving my key,” she says, placing it on the console - the same spot where my phone sat that night, the night I missed our anniversary, the night she heard me say the words that started all of this. “Don’t follow me to Calabria. Don’t show up at my parents’ house. Give me time to think.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know. However much it takes.”
She picks up her suitcase and walks out the door, and I stand in the entryway and listen to her car start, listen to the tires on the gravel, listen to the sound of my marriage driving away.
***
I don’t sleep that night.
The fever keeps me awake, thrashing in sheets that still smell like her, replaying every moment of the last year and trying to pinpoint exactly when I lost her.
Was it the missed anniversary? The overheard call? The dinner where I let her sit invisible while Bianca finished my stories? Or was it earlier, the slow accumulation of absences, the nights I didn’t come home, the mornings I left before dawn?
All of it. It was all of it, each small betrayal building on the last until the weight of them collapsed the foundation.
At 5 a.m., when the fever eases enough for me to think clearly - a temporary reprieve, not the real break - I call Gianni.
“Antonio?” His voice is groggy with sleep. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I need you to do something for me.”
“Can it wait until morning?”
“It is morning. And no, it can’t.” I sit up in bed, pressing my palm against my forehead. Still warm, but manageable. “The documentary crew. The one that’s been filming behind the scenes.”
“What about them?”
“They were in the corridor the day before yesterday - Monday - and again yesterday. Near Building C. Near my dressing room.”
“Okay?”
“I need that footage preserved. Both days. Whatever they shot in the corridors, the common areas - I need it kept safe.”
There’s a pause. “Antonio, what’s going on?”
“My wife left me tonight. She saw something - someone staged something to make her think…” I stop, take a breath. “I can’t explain everything right now. But you were in my dressing room on Monday. You saw Bianca with my phone.”
“She said she was looking for a number.”
“Did I ask her to look for a number?”
Another pause, longer this time. “No. You told me where to find your phone. You didn’t say anything about Bianca.”
“So why was she in there? Why did she have my phone?”
I can hear Gianni processing this, the pieces clicking into place. He’s not stupid - he’s been in this industry long enough to know that not everything is what it seems.
“I’ll talk to the production company,” he says finally. “The documentary footage belongs to them, but they’ll preserve it if we ask. Both days - Monday and Tuesday. Standard procedure for any footage that might be relevant to… anything.”
“Thank you.”
“Antonio. Whatever’s happening - are you okay?”
“No.” The word comes out raw, honest. “I’m not okay. But I’m going to fix it.”
After I hang up, I sit in the dark and think about what to do next.
The press will have questions. They always do when a famous marriage implodes. There will be headlines and speculation and a hundred different narratives about what went wrong, and Bianca will be at the center of all of them, playing whatever role suits her purposes.
I can’t stop her from talking. But I can get ahead of it. I can say what I know to be true, before she has a chance to twist it into something else.
I pick up my phone and compose a statement.
It takes me an hour to get the words right. I want to protect Cassandra without accusing Bianca of things I can’t prove. I want to take responsibility for my own failings without admitting to sins I didn’t commit. I want to be honest, even when honesty is complicated.
Reports of any inappropriate relationship with my co-star Bianca Fioravanti are categorically false. I have never been unfaithful to my wife.
What is true is that I have been an absent husband - consumed by work, negligent of my marriage, and unworthy of the trust Cassandra placed in me. Whatever happens next in our personal lives is between us and is not fodder for public speculation. I ask for privacy during this difficult time.
I read it three times. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t say everything I want to say. But it says enough.
I send it to my publicist with instructions to release it immediately.
Then I pick up the phone again and call the director.
“Antonio?” He sounds even groggier than Gianni did. “Do you know what time it is?”
“I’m done.”
“What?”
“With the film. I’m quitting. I know what it costs - the delays, the reshoots, the insurance nightmare. I’ll pay whatever penalties are in my contract. But I’m not coming back to that set.”
“Antonio, you can’t just - we’re six weeks from wrap…”
“Find someone else. Reshoot my scenes. Do whatever you have to do. I’m done.”
I hang up before he can argue.
The room is silent around me, the first gray light of dawn creeping through the curtains.
I’ve just destroyed a film I’ve spent months on. I’ve probably destroyed my reputation along with it - the reliable professional who always shows up, who never walks out, who puts the work above everything.
But the work is what cost me my marriage.
The work is what I hid behind while Cassandra disappeared. The work is the excuse I used every time I should have been home, should have been present, should have been the husband I promised to be.
No more.
I lie back against the pillows and close my eyes, and for the first time in a year, I know exactly what I need to do.