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“Does she stick to the list?” he asked.
“I was planning this for after your next movie came out,” Yasmin said, not answering the question. “But with the buzz around you and Megan at the SAG Awards, her team figures strike while the actor is hot.”
Though Alessandro hadn’t been nominated for the SAGs, his movie had been in several categories, and many guests had told him he’d been robbed. Megan had accompanied him, dressed in a dramatic blood-red dress with an enormous and intricately pleated design going diagonally from shoulder to hem. She’d made several best-dressed columns the next day, and no one could stop talking about her boyfriend and the shot-through-the-heart looks he’d been giving her all night.
“This isn’t just any interview,” Alessandro protested. “This is Lily Liebowitz. You know who her sister is.”
Megan whispered, “Who?” and Alessandro took the phone away from his mouth and said, “Didi Ravello.”
Megan’s eyes widened, and a cowl of doom settled over him. Whatever he did, this would go wrong. The same way he’d known since he was fourteen that he couldn’t stay in his family. The same way he’d known when that last designer had run his hand over Alessandro’s butt while he was supposed to be checking the fit on a loose pair of pants. He knew this was the end of something. He would have to do the interview and risk the Ravello family finding his family in Italy or not do the interview and disappoint everyone whose livelihoods depended on him playing the game.
“I do not have a choice, do I?” he said, his eyes not leaving Megan’s.
“No, but ’Sandro, we will handle her,” Yasmin said. “She has the questions. You don’t have to be like the others. If you don’t want to answer anything she asks, just don’t do it. What was that moody actor persona for if not for moments like this? Just glare at her like you’re probably doing me right now.”
Inevitable. His life was full of endings. He could only remind himself that he’d had beginnings, too, and he was now doing a job he loved.
“All right. What time?”
“Makeup at three. Max will pick you up at one thirty. Megan can come, too, by the way. Just not into the interview itself, of course.”
“Okay,” he said and hung up.
“Sweetheart,” Megan said, “you look like she just told you the date of your funeral.”
“You have watched Lily’s interviews?”
“Yes, but—”
“She has already found out about my family. And my previous job. I know it. Didi has dug around in my history, she has found out, and she has told her sister, and that is why she wants to interview me.” He took his phone, which was still in his hand, and googled his parents’ names. He showed her the screen. “My father is conducting the San Francisco Philharmonic on Sunday night.”
“Oh, Jesus. He’s in town? Well, in the state?”
Alessandro shrugged.
“And he didn’t even tell you?”
“Cara, I thought you understood. They are not my family.”
“God.” She unfolded herself from her club chair at the end of the bed they’d shared for a blissful month and sat in his lap. She brushed his hair from his temples and kissed them. “I’m so sorry.”
“I am not. It is better this way.”
“Not to be around your family? How is that better?”
He looked away from her and frowned. “You are away from your family. You have given them up.”
“Not forever.” She sounded shocked at the very idea. Did she judge him for staying away from his parents and brothers? Of course she would. She saw her siblings as good people.
“No. Not forever. But for me, it is better if it is forever.”
Of course, if she wasn’t going to fight with her sister forever, that meant she would eventually leave him and go back to Boston. His hands twitched on her hips as the shot punched through his heart again. And all because Megan’s brother had caught Didi Ravello’s eye more than ten years ago.
“I have another idea,” Megan said. She was still stroking his hair off his forehead, and Alessandro couldn’t resist leaning into her, breathing in her lemony scent. While he could.
“What is that?” he asked.
“What if you tell Lily all about it?”
