The silence that followed was absolute. Two hundred people held their breath, waiting to see what would happen next.
“My daughter,” I said, my voice breaking on the words, “calls you family. She’s been telling everyone at school about her Italian stepdad. She made you that ridiculous ring because she was so sure you were staying.”
Mario flinched like I’d hit him.
“Was any of it real?” I asked. “Or was I just the convenient cover story while you figured out your real life?”
“Of course it was real,” he said roughly. “All of it. Every moment. You have to know that.”
“Then why does it feel like you’ve already left?”
The community center was dead silent except for the heating system and what sounded like June sniffling behind her phone camera. My mother’s face in the crowd was a picture of heartbreak and confusion.
I couldn’t do this anymore. Couldn’t stand on this stage and dissect our relationship while the entire town watched like it was dinner theater.
“I need to leave,” I said.
I walked off the stage on unsteady legs, through the crowd that parted like the Red Sea, past my beautiful flower arrangements and the pumpkin archway that suddenly felt like monuments to my own stupidity. Behind me, I heard Mario call my name, but I didn’t turn around.
Outside, the October air hit me like a slap—sharp and cold, carrying the scent of woodsmoke and dying leaves. I’d left my coat inside, but I couldn’t go back. Couldn’t face the stares and the whispered conversations and the awful, suffocating weight of everyone’s pity.
My phone was already buzzing in my clutch. Text after text after text, but I couldn’t look. Couldn’t bear to see the messages of sympathy or, worse, the requests for details.
I made it to my car before the tears hit—great, gasping sobs that felt like they were being torn from somewhere deep in my chest. This was what I got for letting myself believe in fairy tales. For thinking that maybe, this time, someone would choose to stay.
A gentle tap on my window made me look up. My mother stood there in the cold, holding my coat and purse, her face soft with understanding.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said when I cracked the window.
“Please don’t,” I managed through my tears. “Don’t say anything nice or understanding. I can’t handle it right now.”
“I brought your things,” she said simply, passing them through the window. “And I may have accidentally knocked over the dessert table while chasing Patricia Downs away from the reporters.”
Despite everything, I let out a watery laugh. “Mom, you didn’t.”
“My elbow slipped. Repeatedly.” Her eyes flashed with righteous anger. “That woman has been waiting like a vulture to pick our family apart, and I won’t stand for it.”
“It’s not her fault,” I said quietly. “She just said what everyone was thinking. That this was too good to be true.”
“Nonsense.” Mom’s voice was fierce. “That boy looks at you like you hung the stars. Whatever’s happening with this job business, it’s not about you not being enough.”
“Then why does it hurt so much?”
She reached through the window and touched my cheek. “Because love always hurts when someone you care about makes choices that don’t include you. Even when they have good reasons.”
I leaned into her touch, feeling like I was seven years old again.
“Do you want to get Olivia and go home?” she asked gently.
“She’s asleep, isn’t she?”
“Dead to the world. Leave her for tonight. Go home, have that cry, and tomorrow we’ll figure out how to explain this mess to her.”
The drive home was a blur of tears and streetlights. The house felt too quiet when I walked in, too empty. Mario’s jacket still hung by the door—the one I’d borrowed during the rainstorm. Without thinking, I pressed my face against it, breathing in the scent of him.
On the kitchen table, Olivia’s heritage project lay half-finished, Italian phrases written in Mario’s careful handwriting scattered across the poster board. Next to it sat the pipe cleaner ring she’d made for him, still shedding glitter onto the table like tiny pieces of broken dreams.
I picked it up, feeling the rough texture of the twisted wire, seeing where she’d carefully wrapped each section with embroidery floss in his favorite color—dark blue. She’d spent hours on this ridiculous thing, so proud of her creation, so certain it would be needed someday.
