"How many more times in this life will you drink for me?"
I watched Raffaele's eyes turn red at the rims.
Without a word, he tipped his head back and drained the glass.
Alessia's gaze grew even more sorrowful.
"Raffaele, I just need one answer from you. You're marrying her — is it because you love her, or is it because—"
Before she could finish, Raffaele cut in, his voice cracking.
"I don't love her."
The entire room went silent. Not the polite kind. The kind that falls over a table when a made man says something that can't be taken back — when the air tightens and even the soldiers stationed at the doors stop breathing.
I drew in a long breath. Something heavy inside my chest finally settled.
Years of loving him in secret. Years of chasing him.
I had traded away every last scrap of my dignity for what turned out to be a joke.
If he didn't love me, then I would set him free.
That afternoon, I was at the Valente house packing my bags and sorting through my documents — the forged church papers, the unsigned Commission record, the few personal things worth carrying out of a life built on nothing. My fingers found the edge of my black glove on the dresser and I folded the leather between thumb and forefinger, pressing the crease until it held.
Then a message from Raffaele appeared on my phone.
I didn't know whether Donna Moretti had said something to him. But for the first time in our lives, he was asking me to dinner at the restaurant by the harbor.
Old Moretti-controlled territory ran along the waterfront. Our parish school and the secondary academy the families used had both been built within sight of it.
Back then, I used to love slipping down to the harbor wall for picnics — bread, olives, a stolen bottle of limonata from Marco's kitchen.
Raffaele always called me childish and refused to come along.
But on my eighteenth birthday, he had awkwardly produced a folded document.
He told me he'd bought the waterfront lot by the harbor and that he was going to build a beautiful restaurant with a view of the water there, just for me.
"Happy with your birthday present?"
In the golden light of the setting sun, the boy had grinned at me, proud and bashful all at once.
After that, every time he hurt me badly enough that I wanted to let go, I would think of that afternoon, and talk myself into waiting a little longer.
The day that memory stopped making me feel anything would be the day I could leave.
When I didn't reply, Raffaele called me directly.
"Didn't you see my message?"
"I said let's go to dinner tonight."
I blinked. For the first time ever, I turned him down.
"No, thanks. I already have plans tonight."
He clearly hadn't expected that. In the silence on the line I could almost hear him recalibrating, the way he did before any sit-down that wasn't going the way he'd mapped it.
Raffaele paused, and when he spoke again his tone had gone stiff.
"It's the first day of our marriage. Who exactly do you have plans with?"
Only then did it hit me — "dinner" was probably a task Donna Moretti had given him. Donna and my mother Elena were the closest of friends, bound by decades of alliance trust and shared Sunday tables, and she had always been fond of me.
After Raffaele humiliated me like that at the ceremony yesterday, she was probably worried I was heartbroken, so she told him to come home early and smooth things over.
I let out a knowing smile. "Relax. I won't go saying anything to your mother. You're free to do whatever you want tonight. When she asks, I'll back up whatever story you give her."
This was the unspoken arrangement we had settled into since last Christmas Eve.
Last Christmas Eve, Raffaele had wanted to slip out and bring food to Alessia at the clinic front.
So he told his family I'd been in a car accident and he needed to stay with me at the private clinic. Once he was out the door, he called me.
"If my mother calls asking about the accident, just tell her I'm with you and it's nothing serious. Tell her not to worry."
I had been furious and hurt. "I begged you for two weeks to spend Christmas Eve with me and you kept saying the family had dinner plans you couldn't get out of. Now Alessia just wants a breakfast wrap, and suddenly you can get away?"
"Lying to your family so you can go be with her — that's fine with you?"
"Using my health as your excuse — that's fine with you too?"
Raffaele was quiet for two seconds.
Then he clicked his tongue, impatient.
"Do you ever stop? It's one little lie. Can you quit being so superstitious about it?"
"If you really can't do this one thing for me, then let's just call off the engagement. Being with you is exhausting."
We had grown up together. Nobody knew my weak spots better than Raffaele.
For as long as I could remember, the one thing I had wanted most was to marry him.
