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Instead, I’m back in a bedroom that doesn’t feel like mine, with a fiancé who has barely spoken to me in a week, except for at the rehearsal today, and then tonight to whisper filthy things in my ear until he came all over my bare ass. I’ll spend the night alone in my strange new bedroom, and I won’t see Ana until tomorrow, when she comes to help me get dressed.
I don’t even know if Luca is dragging me onto a faux honeymoon, to keep up appearances. I’m guessing he won’t—but who knows? It would be just like him to force us into spending a week avoiding each other in the Caribbean, or something insane like that.
After tonight, who knows?
It doesn’t matter,I tell myself firmly as I reach for the lights. After tomorrow this whole mess of a wedding will be over, and we can go back to ignoring each other. Hating each other. Trying to spend as much time away from each other as possible. I can forget about what happened tonight, and we can move on. Luca can go back to fucking as many nameless women as he wants, and I can pretend like I was never close to begging him to let me come.
But now, with that memory still filling my head, I can’t help but think of how tomorrow night could be different.
It’s just my luck that he’s fucking gorgeous.If he were older, or ugly, or losing his hair, it would be easy to avoid sleeping with him. But instead, I’m engaged to the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen. A man with a jawline that could cut glass and piercing green eyes, a man who wears suits that fit him like a second skin, a man who kisses like he wants to eat and drink and breathe me all at once, like my mouth is the only thing keeping him from dying. Like he wants to devour me.
Thank God we’re getting married in a church,I think grimly. If he kissed me like that tomorrow, I’m not sure what I would do.
Climb him like a tree in front of everyone, probably, and damn the consequences.
I flick on the light, and my heart stops in my chest.
The room isn’t strange and unfamiliar anymore. While we were gone, it’s been transformed. The grey quilted duvet on the bed has been replaced with my thick blue-flowered one, the sleek white hotel-style pillows have been replaced with mine from my apartment, and the cable-knitted, light pink blanket that I used to love curling up under on rainy days is thrown across the foot of the bed. My bookshelf is against one wall, filled with my books, and as I walk further into the room, I see my jewelry box sitting on the nightstand. Next to it is a flat black box and a smaller velvet one, and a note.
I don’t move to read it yet, though. I feel like I can’t breathe, and I can’t stop the tears from welling up in my eyes.
My things are here. Not everything I owned, but everything important to me—or at least almost everything—
And then I walk around to the other side of the bed, and I see it.
My violin case, propped against the wall.
I reach up to touch the necklace at my throat, my heart racing in my chest. I don’t know who did this for me, or why—but what I do know is that it couldn’t have happened without Luca’s approval. He had to have allowed this—if he didn’t outright ask for it himself.
Confusion floods me as I sit down on the edge of the bed, smoothing my hands over my duvet, looking at my violin case with watery, stinging eyes.I don’t understand him,I think, frustration welling up in me. I can’t reconcile the man who coldly told me to choose between marrying him and death, the man who’s avoided me for the last week, the man who wouldn’t even look at me on the drive home tonight, the man who pinned me down over a couch and used me as a fuck toy, with the man who left dinner outside my room, who defended Ana, who now has given me a better wedding gift than I would have ever thought to ask for—the feeling of being at home in my own room, on one of the most difficult nights of my life.
As if he knew how hard tonight would be for me, how scared I am of tomorrow, and wanted to make it better somehow.
Slowly, I sink down to the floor, reaching for my violin case. For eight years, I’ve left the last letter that my father wrote me inside of it, because I couldn’t bear to read it. But now on the eve of the wedding to the man that he promised me to, the man heentrustedme to, I know it’s time.
Maybe it will help me understand, somehow. Because I’ve never felt more confused than I do at this moment.
The envelope is still tucked in the lining of my violin case, stiff and slightly yellow with age. I open it carefully, sliding out the sheet of paper with my father’s spidery cursive trailing across it—the last words that he will ever say to me.
I can feel tears welling in my eyes before I even begin.
My dearest Sofia,
If you’re reading this, it’s because I’m no longer here. That’s a cliché way to begin a letter like this, I know, but I don’t know of any other way to start this off. It’s breaking my heart to write this, because I can’t bear the thought of leaving you so soon, of missing out on so much of your life.
You have so much ahead of you, my darling girl, and I want you to have all of it. I want you to have the life you dreamed of, to go boldly forward and pursue every talent and gift that you’ve been given. You are the smartest, most beautiful, most talented daughter that your mother and I could have asked for, and I have never regretted that you are my only child, Sofia, because it meant that all of the love I have to give is yours. You are the light of our lives, and if I have one regret, it’s that my own choices might ever put you in danger.
And that, Sofia, is why I’m writing this letter. In the future, you may find out things about your dear father, things that might cause you to question who I am, and if I’m really the man you think you know. It’s fair for you to question those things. But if there’s one thing you never question, I hope that it’s my love for you.
If events come to pass as I think they might, and this letter finds its way into your hands, know that I will have taken steps to protect you and your mother from what might come after. Know that I’ve done my best to make sure that you’re provided for. And know that I have made a choice—one that you might not understand, one that might even make you resent me, but that I feel was the only one Icouldmake, under the circumstances.
Marco Romano was my best and dearest friend, and it is my hope that he will raise his son to be like him, a man who does what he must, but who takes no joy in cruelty, a man with honor, who will keep the vow that I will ask his father to make. I can’t tell you here what that promise is, but please know, my dearest daughter, that I would not have done it if I felt there were any other choice.
The tears are falling too hard and fast for me to continue reading, and I set the letter down, afraid of getting it wet and causing the ink to run. All I can think of is my father in his office at home, writing this letter with me in my room a few doors down, knowing that death was coming for him.
His heart was breaking, and I never knew it. There was so much about him that I didn’t know, and I cover my mouth with my hand as the grief hits me all over again, my entire body shaking. I will never, ever know the other half of the man my father was, the part of him that he hid from us. All I have is this letter, and the knowledge that he trusted his friend to raise a son worthy of me, if the day came that I had to marry him.
So is Luca that man? Or did my father misjudge his friend? Did his friend fail?A half an hour ago, I would have said yes. But now, sitting here surrounded by the trappings of my bedroom, I can’t help but wonder ifI’mthe one who has misjudged Luca. If there’s something more under his cold, heartless exterior, the way Father Donahue hinted that there could be.
