“She looked sick, really frail,” I tell him.
He picks up the phone on his desk. “I want the CCTV footage from the lecture hall Antonia just left. I want to know everyperson in that room and I want a picture of their faces.” He hangs up. “I’m sorry. I’ll increase security for you,” he tells me.
“She’s not going to hurt me. She’s asking me to look out for her daughter. Those aren’t the words of someone who wants me gone,” I say.
“Probably.” Carlo sits on the sofa. I walk over and sit next to him.
“There’s something else you should know.” I open my phone and pull up the texts from the unknown number. Whoever this person is, they’re more of a threat than Jazzy’s mom.
Carlo reads the messages and looks up at me. “You considered their offer?”
I shake my head. I did momentarily, but I’m not stupid. Whatever they want, it’s not to help me. “I promised Jazzy I’m not going anywhere. I plan on keeping that promise,” I tell him. “No matter how I feel about our situation, no matter what happens between us, I’m not breaking my promise to that little girl.”
“Us? Antonia, nothing is happening to us. We’re married. We will be married until the day we die.”
“You don’t know that,” I say. “You’ll meet someone else, and that’s okay.”
“I’m not looking for someone else. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
“People who love each other don’t cheat, Carlo,” I snap at him. I can’t hear his empty promises of love. I can’t let myself fall for them.
“Okay, since we’re laying everything out on the table, I need to show you something.” He stands and walks over to the wall. Moving a picture out of the way, he opens a safe and then shuffles around until he’s pulling out documents. “This was delivered to me three years ago.A weekbefore you saw what you saw,” he says, handing me the folder.
“What is it?”
“I didn’t ever want you to see this. I didn’t want to hurt you, Antonia. I didn’t have a choice. I needed to keep you away from me to protect you, and the only way I could do that was to make you believe I was cheating,” he says.
I sit down and open the folder. My hands shake as I shift through picture after picture. Then the documents. Real estate titles, marriage certificates, birth certificates. “What? How did you get this?”
“After I received the threats—there at the bottom—I started digging to make sure they were legit.”
I flip through until I find the letters that were sent to Carlo, telling him he had to stop seeing me or the woman in the pictures would be killed, along with her children.
The thing is, the woman in the pictures was supposed to be dead already. I’ve been told my whole lifeshewas dead. Because this woman is the spitting image of my mother. I know, because my father has pictures of her up all through his house. He always said she was the love of his life, and he kept her pictures up to remind himself of the good in the world. It was the only time he seemed like he had a heart, or any semblance of one. He loved my mother; he just hated me.
“I didn’t want to be the reason your mother and siblings died, Antonia, even if you didn’t know about them at the time,” Carlo says.
“Are they… they’re alive?” I ask him.
“Yes.”
“What about the threats?”
“The asshole who sent them is gone,” he says.
“He’s gone and you didn’t think to come tell me about this? To try to fix us? You just left us broken? For how long, Carlo?”
“It took me a year to find him. And after that, I figured you were better off away from me anyway,” he says. “I swearon everything in me… I didn’t do it. I never cheated on you, Antonia.”
Chapter Seventeen
Iwas supposed to go out tonight, but after dropping that bombshell on Antonia, I decided to stay in. Told Louie I couldn’t make it. Antonia and Jazzy are in the living room playing a board game while I cook dinner. Spaghetti. Jazzy loves pasta.
My phone vibrates on the counter. Seeing it’s one of my tech guys I have looking into the CCTV footage of Antonia’s lecture hall, I swipe the answer button.
“What have you got?” I ask him.
“Found her. Got facial recognition running now. We should have her identity in a couple of hours.”
