Two years overseas, learning the trade at Don Lombardi's table, and I cut it short, coming home glowing with happiness, ready to be a bride.
But while I was setting up the house that was meant to be ours, I found over a thousand plane tickets the man I'd been promised to for ten years had carefully saved.
At least one crossing to England every single month, and not one of them was for me.
Even though I was barely a hundred miles from where he landed.
I came early to the place he'd dressed up for the proposal, and there he was, down on one knee, pledging himself to the woman he loved:
"Vittoria, will you marry me? Say the word, and I'll have the bride swapped out before the night is through."
His eyes were so full of longing that I couldn't make my feet carry me one step closer.
If I wasn't the woman he meant to bind his life to, then I'd hand this whole alliance over to them and be done with it.
But after I walked away from that ceremony, he crossed oceans and turned over half the world looking for me.
……
The room was draped in roses, soft and close under a warm yellow glow.
Lorenzo Falcone on one knee was the exact picture I'd built in my head a thousand times of my own pledge.
But the woman standing across from him wasn't me.
"Vittoria, will you marry me?"
Vittoria Marchetti had one hand pressed to her lips, the other already reaching out, trembling, for the roses.
A diamond caught the light as it slid onto her finger.
The two of them folded into each other, kissing deep, and the low, intimate sounds drifted to me on the still air.
I caught myself absently turning the matching band Lorenzo had mailed me from across the water.
I'd never told him the ring ran too big.
To keep it from slipping, I'd wound half a loop of red thread around the band until it finally sat right.
Maybe it was the wear of all those months, but one hard pull and the thread came loose.
Freed of the thread, the ring slid clean off the base of my finger and rolled away into a far storm drain.
Just like Lorenzo, freed of me across two years of water.
A ring that doesn't fit doesn't need picking up. A man who doesn't love me doesn't need holding onto.
"Lorenzo, I hope your wedding goes ahead just as you've planned it."
"Why? I only want to marry you."
"Because… I want to walk into your wedding and take the groom. Then everyone will know you love me most."
My feet, already turning for the door, went still.
Because I wanted to know just how far Lorenzo would go to wound me for Vittoria's sake.
"You wicked little thing, only you could dream up a scheme that filthy."
"Then I'd better keep a second pair of shoes by the door, so I can run faster when I steal you away."
"And you'd truly do that to Adriana Castellano?"
"Keeping my word and standing at the altar with her is already my limit. If she can't even hold onto her own husband, if he's taken from her at the altar, that's no fault of mine, is it?"
The two of them broke into delighted laughter, and it went through me like a knife between the ribs.
I turned and leaned into the trunk of a tree, my legs too weak to carry me another inch.
Terrified my crying would reach them, I clamped a hand over my mouth and made myself leave.
But halfway out, my legs gave way beneath me and I went down hard on the ground.
I got home a wreck and called the old Don who'd taught me everything across the water.
"Padrino, that work you spoke of, taking a place at your table. I'm in. I'll come."
Don Lombardi was glad of it, but puzzled too.
"Didn't you tell me you were going home to be married, to settle into that life? Or has your intended agreed to all this distance between you? A union lived apart is no union at all, figlia. Are you certain you won't take your time and think it through?"
I pressed at my scraped knee, every touch sending a sharp, piercing ache through me.
"The wedding is off. From now on I'm your right hand, given fully to the work."
Don Lombardi had always treated me as his own blood, and he caught the wrong note in my voice at once.
"As it happens, the door closes today. I'll set your name down myself. Come home to us soon and we'll bury ourselves in it. A person kept busy has no hours left to sit with old wounds."
"Don't take it hard, an old man speaking out of turn, but these two years it was always you crossing the water to him, and never once did he make the journey to you on his own. That tells you plainly enough how little he loves you."
"Once you've made up your mind to let go, don't keep drowning yourself in what's behind you."
If I hadn't seen that thick stack of tickets, I could have answered the old Don's "how little he loves you" with the same easy certainty I always had.
No wonder he was always too buried in business to reach at the close of every month.
So that was it. Buried in crossing half the world to lie at Vittoria's side.
For two whole years I'd been a fool, driving myself to the bone to keep ahead in my studies, to put my name to the work, all to scrape together the hours to fly home and be near him.
A short reunion after more than ten hours in the air had once been the happiest stretch of my life.
But my love, the love that crossed oceans, had become a joke laid out beside that stack of tickets Lorenzo kept like treasure.
On the way to the proposal, I'd even talked myself into believing he might go to England for the Family's business.
But watching him kneel to Vittoria, the woman who had abused me, I finally understood why he'd never once come the short hundred miles to see me.
Vittoria wouldn't allow it, so he fed me sweet lies about how he ached for me.
He knew full well that Vittoria and I were sworn enemies.
To be exact, after my father remarried and built his second house, Vittoria and her mother became the darkest shadow over my childhood, the Marchetti blood folded into the Castellano name.
I'd pictured it more times than I could count, that across two years of distance, Lorenzo might give his heart to someone else.
But the one thing I never once imagined was that he'd give it to Vittoria, that to earn her favor he'd agree to disgrace me at my own altar.
I sank into the warm bath, and only then did my body slowly stop shaking.
Lorenzo's call came through.
"Adriana, where are you? I'm already at Seaside Park."
