Then Gianluca's phone began to vibrate.
It buzzed against the center console, insistent, relentless. I glanced at it, then back at the road. It didn't stop. The screen lit up again and again, casting pale blue light across the dark interior of the car. I hesitated, my fingers tightening on the steering wheel. I had never once checked his phone. In all our years together, I had respected the unspoken boundary, the private space every person was entitled to, even in an arrangement like ours.
But the vibrating wouldn't stop. And the need for answers had become a living thing inside me, clawing at my ribs.
I pulled the car to the curb, put it in park, and picked up the phone. It wasn't password-protected.
The message on the screen was from Adelina Vianello.
"Text me when you get home. If Gianluca gets drunk, he'll have a headache tomorrow. Make him a bowl of hangover soup and let it cool before you give it to him. Don't forget to wipe his body down, otherwise he'll be uncomfortable while he sleeps."
I stared at the words until they stopped making sense and then started making a different kind of sense entirely. She had sent these instructions from Gianluca's phone to mine. As if I were the help. As if I were a servant in my own home, being given orders by the woman who had no right to give them. Here I was, the night before my wedding, my blood-bound union to the heir of the Castellano Family, and I was receiving care instructions for my own fiancé from another woman.
The absurdity of it was so complete it almost made me laugh. Almost.
I took a deep breath, steadied my hands, and began scrolling through the chat history.
There were hundreds of messages between Gianluca and Adelina. Hundreds. The scroll seemed endless, conversation after conversation stretching back months, maybe longer. I couldn't reach the beginning no matter how far I swiped. The screen was filled with Gianluca's complaints, his frustrations, his unguarded thoughts, punctuated by Adelina's careful, measured replies. She never said too much. She never had to. She simply existed in the space he kept open for her, and that was enough.
One exchange stopped me cold.
"Honestly, I don't really want to go through with this union, but how can I not? She saved my life. I owe her that much."
And then, a few messages later:
"She has a name similar to yours, but she's nowhere near your level. She just doesn't understand me at all."
The words landed like a blade between my ribs. I read them again. And again. Each time they cut deeper, finding new nerves, new places to wound. The casual cruelty of it. The offhand dismissal. As if five years of devotion, of loyalty, of standing beside him through every sit-down and every threat and every long night waiting for him to come home alive, amounted to nothing more than a name that happened to sound like someone else's.
I kept scrolling.
"If I proposed to you, would you say yes?"
Adelina hadn't replied immediately. Gianluca had followed up with a self-deprecating deflection: "Just kidding. Don't ignore me. I won't say it again."
The conversation had gone quiet after that. A silence that said more than words ever could. Then, this morning, Gianluca had sent Adelina an electronic copy of our wedding invitation. The invitation to our blood-bound union, the ceremony that was supposed to seal the alliance between the Ferraro and Castellano families forever.
Adelina's response had come hours later: "If I asked you to marry me instead, would you come?"
Gianluca had replied within seconds: "Are you serious?"
"I'm just joking," Adelina had answered.
I could picture it with devastating clarity. If Adelina had said yes, if she had been serious for even a moment, Gianluca would have walked away from me, from the alliance, from everything, without looking back. I would have been left standing at the altar of an empty ceremony, a woman abandoned by the man who owed her his life.
Tears filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks before I could stop them. A painful, toxic mixture of hatred and rage and grief surged through me, so violent it made my hands shake. I gripped the phone until the edges bit into my palms.
I had been a fool. A loyal, trusting, blindly devoted fool.
But I was done.
This hollow arrangement, this empty charade of devotion, was something I was better off leaving behind. Whatever remained of the Ferraro name, whatever dignity I still possessed, I would not sacrifice it at the altar of Gianluca Castellano's guilt.
While he lay passed out on the floor where I'd left him, still reeking of whiskey and someone else's perfume, I sat on the edge of the bed and booked a one-way flight to Hudson City. Neutral territory. A place where the old family names carried less weight, where a woman could disappear into a quieter life without looking over her shoulder every hour. The flight was scheduled for the same time as our ceremony. Everything was arranged.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the sound of Gianluca's breathing from the floor. I did not cover him with a blanket. I did not make him soup. I did not wipe his body down.
I closed my eyes and waited for morning.
It came too soon.
I woke to the sound of his voice. He was trying to keep it low, almost whispering, but my bedroom door was slightly ajar, and in the stillness of the early morning, every word carried with crystalline precision.
"Don't cry, Addie," he murmured into the phone, his voice laced with a tenderness I had never once heard directed at me. "The person I love will always be you. If you told me you loved me, I'd do anything. Anything, you hear me?"
A pause. He listened to whatever she said on the other end. I lay perfectly still, my eyes open, my body rigid beneath the sheets.
