Chapter 5: What She Meant to Take
By midnight the wedding guests were gone.
The ballroom that had held two hundred people now held four: Valerio, Alessia, Dr.
Cole, and a man named Ferro who handled certain matters for the Rinaldi family that did not appear in any official record.
Veronica had been moved to a room on the east wing — locked, guarded, comfortable enough that no one could later say she had been mistreated.
Enzo Carrera had given his statement to Ferro and left with a handshake and the quiet understanding that his name would not appear anywhere it didn't need to.
Alessia was on the settee near the fireplace, her injured leg elevated, a blanket across her lap that she hadn't asked for and hadn't removed.
"I want to understand the timeline," she said.
Dr.
Cole looked at her.
"You don't have to do this tonight."
"I want to do it tonight." She looked at Valerio.
"March.
She started refilling my prescriptions in March.
What happened in February?"
Valerio was quiet for a moment.
"Your diagnosis," he said.
"The initial nerve assessment.
The one that came back unclear."
"Which Veronica drove me to."
"Yes."
Alessia absorbed that.
"So she already knew there was something affecting my nerves.
Before she started the refills.
She knew the doctors were already looking at my nervous system." She paused.
"She wasn't causing a new problem.
She was accelerating something the doctors might eventually blame on a pre-existing condition."
Dr.
Cole set down his pen.
"That's a sophisticated understanding of what was happening."
"Is it wrong?"
He didn't answer.
Which was its own answer.
"She wanted it to look natural," Alessia said.
"She wasn't trying to do something sudden.
She was trying to make me disappear slowly."
The fire cracked.
Nobody spoke.
"Why," Alessia said.
Not to the room.
To Valerio.
He looked at her steadily.
"Before you, I was going to marry someone else."
The sentence sat in the air.
"Veronica," Alessia said.
"It was never formal.
Never announced.
But there was an understanding — between her family and mine — that had existed for a long time." He paused.
"When I met you, I ended it.
I didn't end it gently.
I ended it completely, and quickly, and I didn't give her family the explanation they felt they were owed."
"How long ago?"
"Four years."
Alessia looked at the fire.
"She waited four years."
"She came back into the social circle eighteen months ago.
I thought enough time had passed.
I thought—" He stopped.
"You thought she'd accepted it."
"Yes."
Alessia turned to look at him.
"Did you know she still had feelings for you?"
A long pause.
"I knew she hadn't fully moved on.
I didn't know she was capable of this."
"There's a difference," Alessia said quietly, "between not moving on and doing what she did."
"Yes," Valerio said.
"There is."
Dr.
Cole stood.
"I'll come back in the morning with a full treatment plan.
The most important thing right now is rest and no further exposure." He looked at Alessia.
"You're going to recover.
I want you to hear that clearly.
You are going to recover."
She nodded once.
He left.
The room was quieter without him.
Alessia looked down at her hands again.
"She sat with me," she said.
"When I cried in that waiting room.
I told her I was scared.
I told her I thought something was really wrong with me and I was scared." Her voice was even.
Controlled.
"And she rubbed my back and told me I was probably just overworked."
Valerio said nothing.
"I trusted her," Alessia said.
"I didn't have many people here when we married.
My family is far.
My friends were new.
She was — I thought she was one of the only people in this city who actually cared about me."
She didn't cry.
That was the thing.
She said all of it without crying, in the same steady voice, and somehow that was harder to sit with than tears would have been.
Valerio reached over and took her hand.
She looked down at his hand over hers.
"What happens to her now?" she said.
"That depends on what she decides to do next."
"And if she decides to fight it?"
Valerio's thumb moved once across her knuckles.
"Then she fights it.
And she loses."
From the east wing, through two locked doors and a long corridor, not a sound.
But in the morning, when Ferro went to check, Veronica had left a single item on the table beside her untouched dinner tray.
A phone.
Unlocked.
May you like
Open to a conversation thread.
And the name at the top of that thread was one that made Ferro call Valerio before he had finished reading the first message.
