The Family He Lost While Choosing Another

Five years ago, everything began to go wrong at the Moretti coming-of-age gala.

I was eighteen. Dante was twenty-two. The Morettis threw those galas for celebration and business in equal measure, and I had been to enough of them to know better than to keep looking at Dante from across the room.

Vivian made that impossible.

While she fastened my earrings, she smiled at me through the mirror and said Dante might finally confess before the night was over. I told her to stop, but she only laughed and said he had been in love with me for years. Last winter, when he came back from the boxing gym with a split wound and a fever, he kept saying my name. She had even found a half-written letter in his study that sounded like a confession.

I told myself she was making it up.

I still spent half the night watching for him.

Dante stayed near the center of the room, moving from one conversation to the next without giving much away. At one point some rich fool tried to hand me a drink, and Dante stepped in first. He took the glass, said she's not having that, and moved on as if it meant nothing.

A few minutes after that, someone found me and said Vivian had prepared a coming-of-age gift for me in one of the sitting rooms.

The room was empty when I got there.

So was the hallway once the door shut behind me.

I turned at the sound of footsteps and found Dante in the doorway. He looked wrong immediately, and by then I knew I did too. My skin was burning. My thoughts were slipping. When I tried the door, it would not open.

Dante looked at the lock, then at me.

"Don't come any closer," he said.

But by then it was already too late.

The next morning, I woke to daylight and silence.

Dante was sitting at the edge of the bed, shirt half-buttoned, face cold enough to make the room feel colder. When he saw I was awake, he stood and told me he would handle it. He said we would make it official next week and that I would be given my place properly.

For one foolish moment, I believed that meant something.

I thought maybe Vivian had been right. I thought maybe what happened between us had not been entirely one-sided.

It took three days to lose that hope.

By the time the engagement was announced, the family had already turned it into fact. That night, while the celebration was still going on downstairs, I passed the small bar off the library and heard Dante speaking to a few men from the family.

At first, I only caught my name. Then I heard the rest.

"At first, I thought she was different," he said. "But if she had a hand in what happened that night, then this is just me cleaning up a mess."

Someone said it might not have been her. Someone said the whole thing felt wrong.

Dante laughed once, without humor.

"The cameras failed on that floor. She ended up in that room. The door locked from the outside. You really expect me to believe she knew nothing?"

I stood outside the door with my hand on the knob and understood, all at once, what he thought of me.

He thought I had helped arrange it.

He thought I had used that night to force my way into his life.

When I finally pushed the door open, the room went quiet. Dante looked up at me and did not seem surprised to find me there.

I had meant to explain everything.

In the end, all I asked was, "You really think I planned it?"

He looked at me for a long moment and said nothing.

That silence was enough.

Not long after, he was sent to Chicago.

I stayed in New York, carried his child, and waited four years for something to change.

It never did.