Goodbye, Mr. Marchetti Chapter 10

Goodbye, Mr. Marchetti Chapter 10

Vittorio saw me do it.

Something moved across his face.

At the hospital, he sat in the driver’s seat of his own car. His wrist had been bandaged.

“You felt it, didn’t you?” he said. “That night in the courthouse. That’s exactly what you felt.”

I looked at him.

He gave a short, quiet laugh, sad and soft.

“You used to cry when you scraped your knee,” he said. “You were always so dramatic.”

I looked down at my own wrist.

The scar was still there.

Vittorio reached over and pulled up his sleeve.

The bandage was completely soaked through.

“Look at that,” he said. “Now we match.”

Can we start over?

“Hate me if you want. Ruin me if you want. I don’t care. Just stay.”

I took a slow breath.

“I don’t hate you, Vittorio,” I said.

“I loved you once. That was real. So I won’t make it ugly or make it cheap.”

“You won’t be punished. Not in the way you’re imagining.”

“You will never find anyone who loves you the way I did.”

“The world doesn’t give second chances easily.”

“Goodbye, Vittorio.”

The wind picked up. Dead leaves scattered across the windshield.

In the rearview mirror, I watched him cry.

After that night, he never came again.

Enzo pieced together the rest.

Sienna had been calling herself Mrs. Marchetti for years, and everyone had gone along with it.

But she knew it wasn’t true. The panic had never really left her.

She’d tried to control Vittorio, chasing off any woman who got close to him, harassing his female colleagues, causing scenes.

One of the attorneys at his firm had made a joke at her expense, something about how she had a habit of

stealing other women’s men.

Sienna ran her over with her car.

She assumed Vittorio would protect her. He always had.

This time, he didn’t.

The other woman’s family had evidence. They wanted Sienna locked up.

Sienna begged. Vittorio said no.

So she came after me.

She spread lies online. She stood outside my office screaming that I was a homewrecker.

She hired people, the same way I once had, to dig up dirt on Vittorio. And on me.

It didn’t work.

Vittorio had made our marriage certificate public.

I quietly told my story online.

“We were happy once,” I wrote. “And then we weren’t.”

People read it and cried.

Then they turned on Vittorio.

He was expelled from the family. His license was suspended.

Everything he had built, gone.