I said nothing.
Lorenzo grew frantic.
"Adriana, what's wrong? Are you upset?"
"Where are you? I'll come get you right now!"
He was still so attentive, so careful, quick to read every shift in my mood, knowing exactly how to make me feel safe. The same voice that could order a man's hands broken over the phone, gone soft and pleading for me.
"I'm home. I don't feel like going out today."
Lorenzo went quiet for a beat, then kept coaxing.
"Okay. I'll come straight home to be with you."
He didn't demand to know why I'd left him waiting.
It wasn't that he loved me enough to indulge my whims.
It was only because, in that carefully staged room with its candlelight and its hired violinist, he had already offered the pledge ring to the woman he loved, and she had said yes.
I was just his backup plan, the one he kept in reserve for the night his proposal failed.
When Lorenzo walked in, I was just coming out of the bathroom.
The sight of Vittoria Marchetti behind him pulled my brows into a knot.
"Why did you bring her here?"
Was he really so eager that he had to drag her into my home to rub it in my face?
Lorenzo smoothed the lapel of his too-perfect suit with his palm, a flicker of guilt crossing his face.
"Adriana, I ran into Vittoria downstairs and only then found out she lives in our building. She heard you were back from across the water and insisted on coming up to apologize to you."
I watched him perform, my eyes cold.
"Adriana, what my mother and I did back then went too far. I'm apologizing on her behalf. Can you grant us mercy?"
My voice trembled as I asked Lorenzo,
"So you think I should forgive the two of them?"
The pain of a ruptured eardrum. The pain of being beaten with a bamboo cane until my legs went numb. The pain of my mother's keepsakes thrown into the fire pit and burned to ash.
I didn't lower myself to ask him why he'd fallen for Vittoria.
That would have made me look like I had no backbone.
Lorenzo's guilt evaporated as I stubbornly waited for his answer.
"Adriana, Vittoria was just a child back then. What did she understand about right and wrong? She's felt guilty over it for years, and she's already apologized to you. Why keep nitpicking over the past?"
The abuse, body and soul, that dragged me into a bottomless pit, he called that the past.
My refusal to grant Vittoria mercy, he called that nitpicking.
Back then it was him who'd carried me to the back-room doctor, him who'd seen what the Marchetti woman's daughter had done. No one knew better than he did how deeply I loathed the stepmother and stepsister who had married into my blood and my name.
Yet of all people, he had fallen for Vittoria and lined himself up against me.
Lorenzo reached for my hand, trying to make me clasp hands with Vittoria and bury the blade between us.
I slapped his hand away and snarled,
"Lorenzo, what gives you the right to make me forgive those two?"
Abusing me behind my father's back, poisoning him against his own heir, and in the end, after my father died, refusing even to honor him with a proper burial. Leaving the dead untended is the deepest disgrace our world knows, and they had let him rot in it.
Lorenzo looked at the back of his hand, red where I'd struck it, and his brows drew together in confusion and displeasure he couldn't hold back.
"Adriana, I'm doing this for your own good. You have no father, no mother now. Vittoria and her mother are the only half-family you've got left. Why cling to the past, why keep dwelling on it and put yourself through all this agony?"
"People have to look forward, don't they?"
Lorenzo's words were earnest, but on that calm, unruffled face was the impatience I knew so well.
The tenderness and care I used to know were nowhere left in it.
I heard my own heart, already riddled with wounds, shatter completely into dust.
The pain was so deep I could barely speak.
And in Vittoria's brimming, tearful eyes, the smugness and provocation buried beneath were exactly as they had always been. Her smile held a half-second too long, and her fingers found the pendant at her throat and twisted it.
"Adriana, it's fine if you don't grant me mercy. But I'll keep repenting, keep feeling guilty, until you accept me as the family member you have no blood ties to."
"Get out!"
