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He jerked his head away from her soothing hand and looked up at her. “I cannot—”
“I don’t mean your parents. But we’ve been working to control the narrative, and this is an extension of that. Surprise Lily by telling her about your modeling career and why it ended.”
“Cara,” he said, his entire being shying away from saying the words out loud to anyone other than her.
“I know, I know.” She kissed his hair. “I’m asking you to reveal a very secret thing. And if you can’t, I get it. But this can be a weapon for the interview. At this point, you’re not going to make a dent in your career. People already take you seriously.”
He didn’t move, and she tipped his chin up so he had to look at her. “You know that, right? You’ve been nominated for an Oscar, remember? And the SAG Awards. Those people admire your acting skills. You think they’ll change their minds because you walked catwalks ten years ago?”
Was this what death by a thousand cuts felt like? Megan couldn’t know she was flaying him and sewing him back together at the same time. He would end up bleeding out. He knew it. When he’d opened himself up to his parents, they had rejected him. After that, losing acting roles barely touched him. Now he was supposed to open up to a complete stranger? To the entire world?
“No one will care,” Megan repeated. “They will admire your journey. And you’ll still be hiding the deepest part of you. If she mentions your parents, you can deflect. Or just stare at her, like Yasmin said.”
His hands twitched again. “You are asking too much,” he whispered. “You are the only one who has the deepest part of me.”
Megan’s eyes darkened.
“All I’ve done is cause you trouble,” she said.
“I am not complaining.”
“But I still don’t know where this will go. I still don’t know how to bring you and my sister both into my life.”
And then Alessandro knew. She was the most important person in his life. But he wasn’t the most important person in hers. She would go back to her siblings one day. As she should. She had chosen him once, but she wouldn’t do it twice. And he would never be able to recapture the contentment she’d given him.
The contentment bled away from him even as he kissed her. So why shouldn’t he tell the world his secrets? He could no longer tell her.
“What will I say to Lily?” he asked.
♦
The episode aired on Sunday night. Advertising had been wall-to-wall over the TV and internet, so the network got a fifty share even over the premiere of a fantasy series on a streaming service.
Megan and Alessandro dimmed the front windows, poured themselves large glasses of wine, and curled up on the couch to watch.
She had never told anyone apart from her family that she loved them. She hadn’t had to. No one had captured her heart the way Alessandro had. From his ambition to his compassion to his stillness—and don’t forget his body; there was always the red-hot shot of desire that went through her when she thought of that—Megan couldn’t begin to imagine a life without him.
But was that love? Or infatuation? She’d watched her siblings fall in love, one after the other, but it wasn’t as though she’d been in the room when it had happened. Half the time they and their other halves had been at each other’s throats, and the next thing she knew, they were getting married. She and Alessandro hadn’t once argued. Did that mean this wasn’t love?
And he’d said she had the deepest part of him. Did that mean he loved her? She wished she had the guts to ask him outright. But maybe that was just some romantic Italian phrase that just meant he liked being around her.
Because he hadn’t said anything else of the kind since that day, she remained a coward, getting as close physically to him as she could, while her heart swooped and fell with every word, every soft look he gave her.
Lily Liebowitz’s first questions were easy pitches: “How did your role inThe Drummercome about? What was it like working with so-and-so?” Then Lily moved further back. “Tell me about your relationship with Mohammed Bittar.”
He went into their first job together and his pleasure at working with his friend. “I begged Mohammed to take me on in his first movie. I’ve never been so excited than when he won the Ravello. And we have so much history in common.”
Lily laughed, looking to catch him out, to send him off-balance, ready to move in for the kill later. “You can’t tell me you have anything in common with a Lebanese immigrant whose father was killed before he was born!”
“Not that, no,” Alessandro said calmly. “I’m talking about a deeper feeling. A bone-deep knowledge that we had found a brotherhood in each other. We’re both immigrants; we both love movies. We both had to fight to get where we are.”
Lily’s eyes lit up. He’d opened the door. But she only stuck a toe in this time. “Tell me about that. Your early years of acting. When did you know you wanted to be an actor?”
Alessandro gave her a cleaned-up version of his history, leaving out the arguments he had with his parents and his brothers’ sneers and attacks. “But first,” he said, “I needed lessons. And that required money. So I began modeling instead.”
Lily looked up from her papers. Her eyes widened, then narrowed. He’d flipped the narrative on her, just as Megan and Alessandro had planned.
“Thank you,cara,” Alessandro said now, curled up next to him on the couch. “I almost laughed at her.”
