Page 41 of Broken Trust

He stares at me, breathing hard.

“You don't get to decide who holds me when I cry,” I tell him, and my voice shakes, but I don't stop. “Especially when you're the reason I'm crying in the first place.”

His shoulders drop. The anger drains out of his face, and what's left underneath is so raw and so sad that I have to grip the edge of the steel table to keep from going to him.

“You're right,” he says quietly. “I'm sorry.”

He crosses the kitchen, slowly, giving Matteo a wide berth, and sets the envelope down on the counter beside my coffee.

“It's all in there,” he says. “Signed and notarized. Mia can't touch this place. Nobody can.” He looks at me. “I just wanted you to have one thing I didn't wreck.”

Then he nods to Matteo, stiffly, man to man, and turns and walks out. The bell over the entrance jingles, followed by his footsteps crossing the cobblestones, and then nothing.

The radio has moved on to the news. One of the stocks is starting to boil over, and neither of us moves to turn it down.

Matteo lets out a long, low whistle and reaches past me to lower the flame.

“So that's the husband,” he says, wiping his hands slowly on the towel at his hip.

“That's him.” I let out a shaky breath. “In all his glory.”

“He looks like he hasn't slept in a while with those shadows under his eyes.”

“He probably hasn't.” I rub my sore eyes with the heel of my hand. “Neither have I.”

“He's also still in love with you.” Matteo picks up his knife and goes back to the artichokes, not looking at me. “For what it's worth.”

I pick up the envelope with trembling fingers and hold it close, and I don't open it. I don't need to. I stand there in the middle of my kitchen with Dante's promise pressed over my heart while the stocks bubble and the bell tower across the square strikes eleven, and the tears start all over again.

Then it dawns on me, Dante came over only to stop Mia getting her hands on this restaurant, but he still hasn’t signed the divorce papers. He’s not letting me go, whether I want him to or not.

23

DANTE

Saturday nights are the best to drive Uber.

The company gave me a silver Toyota with a cracked cupholder and a pine-tree air freshener that stopped smelling of anything years ago, and I've put twenty thousand kilometers on it since summer. I start at nine, when the restaurants are emptying, and I finish around four, when the last of the clubs spit out their stragglers and the bakeries on Via Roma fire up their ovens. In between, I ferry drunk students and tired nurses and businessmen who don't want their wives to know where they've been. I've had three proposals of marriage, two people throw up in the back seat, and one old man who cried the whole way to the cemetery because it would have been his fiftieth anniversary.

It isn't theatre. Nobody's ever going to write a review. But when the rent's due, I pay it on time, and every other Friday I wire Carlo a little more of what I owe him, and it's been ages since I've seen an envelope stamped FINAL NOTICE.

Rosa's nearly two now. She's walking badly, like a tiny drunk sailor, and she says three words: Nonna, ball, and no. The last one she uses constantly, mostly on me.

We've been living with my parents since July. It was Ma's idea. She saw one of the final notices, and packed our things into boxes herself while I was out at the pharmacy. When I got back, there was a taxi idling outside with the crib already strapped to the roof.

Pa didn't speak to me for the first three weeks. He'd come into the kitchen, see me there, and turn straight back around. Then one morning I came down and found him sitting at the table with Rosa on his knee, letting her smear jam all over his newspaper while he pretended to read the sports page. He looked up at me, his face bright red, and said, “She was crying. You were sleeping.” And that’s how we got talking again.

Ma looks after Rosa on my shifts. I leave at nine, once Rosa's down for the night in the room I grew up in, and I come home at dawn to find Ma dozing in the armchair by the crib with her rosary tangled in her fingers. It isn't what I planned. But it's a life, and it's mine, and I'm not ashamed of it anymore.

At twenty past one, a new job flashes up on my phone. Pickup outside Bar Pellegrini on Via del Moro, going to an address in San Vitale. I know that neighborhood. It's where Nella lives, but so do half the nurses in the city, and it doesn't strike me as strange.

The bar is packed when I arrive, music spilling onto the sidewalk and a crowd of women laughing and hugging goodbye under the fairy lights strung across the entrance. I flick on my hazards and check the name on the screen.

Gianna.

My hands go cold on the wheel.

There must be a thousand Giannas in this city. I tell myself that, and I believe it right up until the back door opens and she slides into the seat behind me, still laughing at something someone said, her cheeks flushed pink from the wine and the cold.