9. Senna
— ? —
Senna
I’m standing in the kitchen with a glass of water I don’t remember pouring when I hear his key in the door.
The drive home took twenty minutes, and I spent every one of them trying to figure out what to say when he walked in.
Do I confront him? Do I ask him directly if he knew where the song came from?
Do I wait for him to explain, to apologize, to show me some sign that he understands the magnitude of what just happened?
But my mind keeps circling the same questions.
Fiorella has my songbook. She’s been working with him in our house for a month, feeding him music that came from my pages.
Did he ever see the handwriting? Did he ever wonder where those melodies came from? And not once, not a single time, did he come to me and say, “Senna, does any of this belong to you?”
Maybe he truly didn’t know. Maybe Fiorella made sure he couldn’t know.
But right now, standing here with my own song still ringing in my ears, all I can feel is the fact that he never looked closely enough to ask.
“Senna!” Rocco bursts through the door with the kind of energy I haven’t seen from him in eighteen months - bright-eyed, flushed, practically vibrating with excitement. “There you are. Did you see? Did you hear it? The showcase was incredible.”
“I was there.”
“I know, I saw you! Why did you leave early? You missed the best part - after the surprise number, Marco came backstage and said the single is going to chart, like actually chart, and there’s already talk about-”
“Rocco.”
“ - and the press coverage is going to be huge, Lucia from the music magazine told me she’s never seen anything like-”
“Rocco.”
He finally stops, registering something in my voice that makes his smile falter. “What? What is it?”
“We need to talk.”
“Okay.” He sets down his jacket, still buzzing with residual adrenaline. “Sure. What’s going on? Are you feeling alright? You looked kind of pale when I saw you in the crowd.”
“Sit down.”
“Senna, you’re scaring me. What-”
“Please. Just sit down.”
He sits at the kitchen table, and I stay standing with the counter between us, needing the distance, needing the barrier.
“The song,” I say. “‘Finding Light.’ The duet with Fiorella. The one you said broke the block.”
“What about it?”
I look at him - really look, trying to see some flicker of guilt, some hint that he knows what he did. But his face is open, confused, the face of a man who genuinely doesn’t understand what’s happening.
And that, somehow, is worse.
“You didn’t notice anything familiar about it?” I keep my voice steady, but it’s an effort. “The melody? The lyrics? Nothing rang any bells?”
“I mean, it’s a new song. Fiorella brought it to me a few weeks into the collaboration. It was rough, but there was something there, and we built on it, and-” He stops, studying my face. “Senna, what’s going on? You’re looking at me like I did something wrong.”
“You did do something wrong.”
“What? The duet? I know I should have asked you first, but it was spontaneous, the host suggested it and Fiorella thought-”
“It’s not about the duet.”
“Then what?”
The words are right there, ready to spill out - it’s my song, you stole my song, you and Fiorella built your comeback on something that belonged to me and neither of you even had the decency to ask.
But I can’t say them, because saying them would mean admitting that I’ve been so invisible in this marriage that my own husband didn’t recognize my work when it was handed to him.
Saying them would mean confronting the fact that he never asked, never noticed, never once in eighteen months of silence and distance thought to check whether I might have something to contribute.
“You never asked me,” I say instead. “That’s what’s wrong, Rocco. You never asked me.”
“Asked you what?”
“Anything.” The word comes out sharper than I intended.
“You never asked me to help with the collaboration. You never asked me to listen to what you were working on. You never asked me to come to the showcase - I showed up on my own, uninvited, and I stood in the back of the crowd like a stranger while you performed with my sister.”
He’s quiet for a moment, processing. “I didn’t think you were interested.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“You never seemed-”
“You. Didn’t. Ask.”
The words hang between us, and I watch his face shift from confusion to something that might be guilt, or might just be the discomfort of being confronted with a truth he doesn’t want to look at.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “Okay, I hear you. I should have included you more. But Senna, things are finally good again. The music is flowing, the label is excited, we’re about to have a hit-”
“Things are finally good again,” I repeat. “For who?”
“For us. For our life. For-”
“There is no us in this, Rocco. There’s you and your music and your collaborator. There’s the career you’ve been building while I’ve been standing right here, waiting for you to remember I exist. But there’s no us.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair?” Something cracks in my chest. “You want to talk to me about fair? I gave up everything for your career. I stopped singing, I stopped writing, I became the supportive wife in the background while you got all the light and all the credit and all the attention. And when you went dark, when the music stopped coming, I was here. Every single day, I was here. And you never once reached for me.”
“I was struggling. You know I was struggling.”
“I know. I watched you struggle. I watched you shut me out, day after day, while you told yourself you’d fix it later.
And then Fiorella showed up, and suddenly you could write again, and suddenly you could feel again, and-” I stop, swallow hard, force myself to continue.
“You told Marco you’d been feeling loveless. I heard you say it.”
His face goes pale. “Senna, that was about the music-”
“I know what it was about. That’s not the point.
The point is that while you were feeling loveless about your music, I was feeling loveless about my marriage, and you never noticed.
You never asked. You just assumed I’d keep being here, keep managing everything, keep waiting for you to come back to me whenever you were done being brilliant with someone else. ”
“I love you.”
“Do you? Because I don’t know what that means anymore.
I don’t know what it means to love someone who treats you like furniture, who ignores everything you try to give them, who-” I stop myself, because I’m getting too close to the thing I can’t say, the song that’s still ringing in my ears, the proof of everything I’m accusing him of. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Senna-”
“I’m done.”
The words land between us like a bomb, and Rocco’s face goes from pale to stricken.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m done waiting. I’m done being invisible. I’m done hoping you’ll wake up and see me when you’ve made it very clear that I’m not what you’re looking for.”
“That’s not - you’re everything I’m looking for. You’re my wife.”
“I haven’t felt like your wife in eighteen months.”
He stands up, moves toward me, and I take a step back instinctively. The hurt on his face is real - I can see that, I’m not so far gone that I can’t recognize genuine pain when it’s standing in front of me - but it’s not enough. It’s eighteen months too late.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”
“I want you to have noticed before I had to tell you. I want you to have asked me to help with the music. I want you to have seen me, Rocco. For eighteen months, I’ve been standing right in front of you, and you kept looking past me toward something else.”
“I was in a slump-”
“So was I!” The words come out louder than I intended.
“My whole life has been a slump since I married you. I stopped singing. I stopped writing. I stopped being anyone except your wife, and you didn’t even notice, because you were too busy grieving your own creativity to wonder what happened to mine. ”
He’s silent for a long moment. Then: “I didn’t know you were unhappy.”
“I know you didn’t. That’s exactly the problem.”
I pull my wedding ring off my finger. It comes easily - I’ve lost weight in the past few months, stress eating away at me the way it always does - and I set it on the counter between us with a soft click that sounds much louder than it should.
“Senna. Don’t.”
“I’m going to stay somewhere else for a while. I need to think.”
“We can talk about this. We can fix it. Things are finally good again-”
“Things are finally good again for you.” I pick up my purse from the counter, the overnight bag I packed while waiting for him to come home. “I don’t think things have been good for me in a very long time.”
I walk toward the door, and I have to pass the hallway wall where his platinum record hangs - the one from his first album, the one I stood beside him to receive, the one from the era when he used to write about our marriage and mean it.
“Senna, please.”
His hand catches mine, and I stop.
“Let me go,” I say quietly.
“I can’t. I can’t just let you walk out.”
I turn to face him, and his eyes are wet, and for a second I feel something crack in my resolve - because I do love him, I never stopped loving him, and this is the man who fished my engagement ring out of that fountain near the Arno and told me Florence forgives.
But forgiveness isn’t the same as forgetting. And I can’t forget the past eighteen months. I can’t forget standing in that crowd tonight, watching him sing my stolen song with my sister, watching him look at Fiorella the way he used to look at me.
“You’ve humiliated me enough,” I say.
I lift his hand off mine.
I open the door.
The ring catches the hallway light as I step across the threshold - a small bright circle on the dark counter, already looking like something that belongs to the past.
I don’t look back.