Page 8 of Broken Trust

They get the scholarships and the good grades and then they get handed the family's books to balance, the accounts to run, the numbers nobody glamorous wants to touch, and a lifetime of people being faintly surprised that a man chose them.

Mia got the opposite. She was worshipped, forgiven every debt and every man, and never once made to build a single thing of her own, which is how the most cherished girl in the family ended up in an apartment which Papa paid for, so she could get herself together.

“Now you listen to me.” She's a breath short from the climb she won't admit is hard. She takes my chin in her cold ringed fingers and turns my face to hers, the way she did when I was small and had cried my composure off before company. “Saturday is the baby shower. You're going to fix your face and you're going to be a good wife. You'll smile. And all this other nonsense, following Dante, it ends tonight.” Her fingers tighten on my jaw. “There is no divorce. Not in this family. Not one of us, not ever. You will not be the first, do you hear me?”

I could go back there, and pull down every last lantern and tell each aunt and cousin exactly what I watched through a gap in a curtain. And Mamma wouldn't be at my shoulder while I did it. She'd be off across the grass with Mia and Dante and the miracle, and by Sunday morning she'd have me remade into the bitter, jealous, difficult sister who couldn't keep her own husband and tried to poison a baby shower to spite the pretty one. She'd make the calls, and set the story before I reached my car. I have watched her do exactly that to other women, and I have clapped along, because it was never me.

And I feel it happen in my own body, standing there. The cold clean resolve I drove home with goes soft and runs out of me like water through my fingers, because leaving Dante was never going to cost me Dante, but my family too.

Her rings are cold when I lift her fingers off my chin, one at a time, and set her hand back down at her side. Whatever's working in my face, I smooth it flat, flatter than hers.

Papa hasn't moved from the newel post. He gives me a small nod, proud of me for folding, and reaches out and pats my arm twice, and that is somehow worse than anything Mamma has said all night, because he means it kindly.

“Good girl,” he says. Then he goes down to fetch their coats.

“I hear you, Mamma.”

I feel nothing as I say it. That's the part that frightens me. Then I turn, and I go into my room, and the door closes behind me soft as a held breath, because even now, even in this, I'm still the girl who learned never to make a sound.

I stand in the dark with my back against the door and I listen to their car pull out of my drive, and it dawns on me, slow and cold and complete.

Dante was broke when we were engaged, a nobody, and I begged my parents ten years ago to give us their blessing to get married.

It serves me right, thinking that he was my knight in shining armor and not the cheating lying pig that he really is.

6

DANTE

The last few days have wrung me out. A week ago I had a lead, a budget, and a theatre. Tonight I've got a half-built set, an assistant director named Riccardo threatening to quit by text, and money vanishing in quiet little cuts made by men who never pick up the phone themselves and always send someone else to do it.

I've spent most nights in hotel bars instead of my own bed, sitting across from men who shake my hand, smile, and slice another line off the budget while I'm still talking. A whole production is coming apart, a dozen people want something from me, and I'm holding it together with my bare hands. And still I keep finding the time to check on Mia: a text about a scan, a voicemail I return from a stairwell at midnight, a detour past her building while I talk myself out of going in.

Four days of that, and now the family wants me in a garden with a smile on my face.

“Go home,” Riccardo told me this morning, of all people, the man whose job I've been doing on top of my own. “Smile for the family. Whatever's falling apart here will still be here on Monday, and you look like you haven't slept all week. Go be a husband for one afternoon.”

The phone lights up on the passenger seat. Mia, for the third time since I left the set. I flip it face down and keep driving. Her calls have been coming closer together all week, and they aren't about the baby anymore, or about ending things. Come to us. We don't need her. Stop dying by inches in that house. Every time I let it ring out, she calls back sooner, and I know what that means. My sister-in-law doesn't chase something she thinks is already walking out the door.

There's a child on the way, my child, however she was made and whatever lie sits on top of her. A man doesn't get to walk away from something he's tied to for life just because walking away would be cleaner for him. So I hold the one line I can hold and let Mia have the rest, and I call that principle, when the honest word for it is weakness with better manners.

That's how I ended up at her apartment again this week, the night I can't stop replaying. I'd gone home for an hour to shower and change, and Gia was at the stove making risotto when Mia rang at seven, breathless and frightened, with cramping low down and spotting that hadn't been there an hour before. I told Gia a rigger had been hurt on set. I didn't even bother to make up a name. Whatever else I am, I wasn't going to leave Mia alone in a taxi and a dark waiting room with my baby inside her, so I drove her to San Luca's and sat in a plastic chair under the fluorescent lights while a tired doctor ran the wand over her belly and found a heartbeat pounding like a drum. False alarm, he said, the body practicing, and he sent us home near midnight, limp with relief.

I walked her up instead of dropping her at the curb, because her legs were shaking and mine weren't, and that's the whole story of us. Mia took my hand and pressed it flat to her belly, and the baby kicked hard against my palm, and for one moment I let myself lean into it, my forehead resting against hers, before the skin on the back of my neck prickled with that old animal certainty of being watched. I went to the front window, absolutely sure I'd look down and find Gia's car at the curb and my whole life finished on the sidewalk below.

There was nothing but an empty street, a trash can on its side, and across the way a curtain swinging back into place as if someone had just let it go.

“It's the widow on the second floor,” Mia said from the sink, without turning around. “She sits at that window all night counting who comes and goes. Ignore her.” Then she came over to look for herself, made a small scornful sound, and let her own curtain fall. “See? Nobody. You're jumping at ghosts, Dante.”

Now I'm pulling up at the one place I have no business being, Gia's twin sister's baby shower. A valet in a rented vest is waiting for my keys at the foot of the drive. I hand them over, stand on the gravel for a moment, button my jacket, and arrange my face into something the family will recognize.

The Rizzos never do anything simply. They have money, and they want everyone to know they're not just rich but filthy rich. The garden has been staged within an inch of its life, with paper lanterns in three shades of blush hung at heights somebody measured, and a long table of food laid out like a still life nobody dares to touch. A photographer drifts through the crowd, and every woman here is dressed for the camera.

Zia Lucia reaches me before I'm three steps onto the grass, grabbing my arm with both hands as if she's been lurking behind the gate for this.

“There he is. There's our boy.” She squeezes hard enough that her rings bite through my sleeve, and up close her smile is lovely without ever getting near her eyes. “You look tired, tesoro. Poor lamb, working yourself to the bone.” She pats my cheek twice, hard enough to sting.

“Somebody has to keep the lights on,” I tell her, and give her the grin that costs me nothing and buys me everything. It's a joke and we both know it, because nothing I earn will ever keep this family's lights on. It's about pride, about letting the Rizzos see that the broke kid their daughter married finally has money of his own.