Page 12 of Broken Trust

My heart slams against my ribs, my head swims, and Papa only sits there watching me as though he has no idea what to do with his own hands. He probably doesn't. Nothing has ever held his interest unless it arrives with a contract attached. Work. Only ever the work.

So I turn, and run. The crowd parts for me exactly the way it once parted for Mia, and I go through it past the untouched food and the paper lanterns, the tears coming so fast the whole garden dissolves into wet smears of blush and gold and gray, colors bleeding together like paint left out in the rain. I don't stop, nor look back to see whether he follows, because in my bones I already know he won't.

A hand closes around my arm near the roses. Zia Fiorella, heavy with perfume, her rings biting into my skin.

“Gianna. Gianna, tesoro, basta, you're making a scene.” Her voice drops to that syrupy hush the women in this family use like a blade. “Come, sit, drink a little water. Think of what people will say.”

“Let go of me, zia.”

“Cara mia, listen to me, this is the wine talking, not you. Tomorrow it will all look different, I promise you, come and sit with Mamma and I will fix you a plate.”

I peel her fingers off my arm one by one, and my voice comes out so calm it frightens even me. “There's nothing to fix, zia.”

I leave her standing there with her mouth working, and I make it to the front of the house and stop on the gravel, chest heaving, with no idea in the world where a woman like me is supposed to go now.

Footsteps behind me. Fast and light. Not his.

“Vieni qui.” Nella's arm is around my shaking shoulders before I've even turned, her phone still glowing in her free hand, her voice sinking into that low steady place it has lived my whole life. “Look at me, cara. Only at me. I've called an Uber and it's already on its way to the gate. Let’s head to the cabin. Sì?”

“Sì.” The word barely survives the crying. “Sì. Please. Take me far away from all of this.”

“I thought you passed out cold on the bed.”

“I was.” She tucks the phone away and folds me in properly, cheek coming down against my hair the way it did when we were small. “Then Carmela shook me awake.” A breath that's almost a tired laugh against my temple. “I'm in no state to drive anyone anywhere, amore, we only have to reach the gate before Mamma works out which door you went through.”

Carmela is the one soul in this whole house I'll grieve when I go. A maid. A woman they pay to stand in the corners. A tear escapes my eyes as I think about her. I know leaving now means I can never come back here, and if it wasn’t for her, I never would want to.

8

DANTE

The garden empties the way a tide goes out, slow and then all at once, and I stand in the wreck of it and watch my marriage leave with the guests.

They go the way people go when they've seen something they'll be retelling in every kitchen in the city by morning. Long, tender goodbyes to my suocera, hands pressed to hers, the sympathy already rehearsed on their faces. Poor family. An aunt I've sat beside at a dozen Christmases passes close enough to touch and looks straight through me, chin lifting, and she's the first one in this family to decide with her whole face that I no longer exist. A cousin steers her husband wide around me toward the cars, a hand at his back, murmuring. Nobody comes to me. That's how I know how bad it is. An hour ago I was the son-in-law who made good, the boy from nowhere who married up and handed them a name to be proud of. Now I'm something they detour around on their way to the valet.

A waiter drifts between the tables lifting glasses, the good crystal, half of them still full, a whole afternoon of toasts nobody got to make. One of the staff has started taking down the lanterns Gia hung, easing them off the wire one at a time, the blush going dark as each little light dies, just like my fucking marriage.

She's gone. Nella took her. I watched the car go from the top of the drive and I didn't run after it, because what was I going to say on that gravel with a hundred people watching, and now the not-running feels like the truest confession I've made all day. She walked out of her own family in front of everyone, and I stood still like the fucking coward I’ve become.

I have spent a year getting my duties so tangled I can't tell anymore which woman I'm supposed to be standing beside. I keep tending the one who needs nothing, and abandoning the one who needs everything, and calling it responsibility.

Or that's the story I'm telling myself, right up until she speaks, and I hear she isn't coming apart at all.

“So what happens to us now, Dante?”

I can’t even look at Mia, let alone answer her right now.

“Gia knows. There's nothing left to hide behind. No more driving home to her. And you want to know what I feel, standing in the wreck of it. Relief.”

“Mia, don't.”

“She was never going to raise this child.” Gentle, like she's handing me good news she's been saving up. “I've known about it since summer. Hand my baby over and then stand at every birthday watching her play mother with your eyes and my face on it. I couldn't stomach the thought. Now I don't have to. She's gone, and she took the lie out the gate with her. It's you and me and our baby.”

“That's not what this was.” I can't get the rest out. None of us in this family ever finish a sentence.

“We don't need her.” A hand lifts off the belly and lands flat on my chest. Her palm presses in. “In six weeks there's a baby that belongs to you and me and no one on this earth besides, and today won't matter at all.”

I look down at her hand, then up at the calm sitting on her face, and something goes cold clean through me, because there isn't a single crack in her. No panic. No grief for what the afternoon cost. Her twin just detonated her own life in that garden in front of every soul she's related to, and Mia stood dead center of it in her blush dress and felt one thing only, the last thing in her way finally stepping aside.