Goodbye, Mr. Marchetti Chapter 11

Goodbye, Mr. Marchetti Chapter 11

Sienna assumed that now he had nothing, he would come back to her.

Instead, he did what he had always done.

He buried her in debt and told her that if she came near him again, she would disappear.

She couldn’t accept it.

One morning, she came at me with a knife and dragged me to the rooftop of a building in the middle of the

city.

The wind was fierce.

There were police down on the street below. My parents were on their way. So was Vittorio.

“It’s all your fault!” Sienna screamed. “You ruined everything!”

She looked exactly the way she had the first time I’d seen her.

Empty. Hollow.

The only difference was, I wasn’t empty anymore.

“Do you remember what you told me?” I asked. “A long time ago?”

She stopped, confused.

“You said you were going to move to the ocean,” I said. “You said, ‘I want to start over.

She started to laugh.

“I can’t go back,” she said. “I can’t go anywhere.”

“But I wanted to, Serena. I really wanted to.”

“What happened to me?”

She looked over her shoulder.

Vittorio was running toward us.

In that moment, I saw it in her eyes. She was completely lucid.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

She let go of me.

Then she ran toward him.

The gunshot was very loud.

Sienna collapsed in the snow.

They rushed Vittorio to the hospital.

But it was too late.

He lay there, reaching for me. His arm wouldn’t lift.

He was trying to breathe through the oxygen mask.

“So this is what it felt like,” he said. “This is what you felt.”

He stared at the ceiling, his gaze going somewhere far away.

“Serena,” he said. “Serena.’

I stood beside him and said nothing.

His last words were:

“Don’t forgive him. Never let him find you again.”

Vittorio was many things, but humility was never one of them.

I didn’t hate him.

I just wanted to love myself differently. More carefully. More completely.

The word “forgiveness” felt too small for everything that had happened. Too thin to hold the weight of it.

Vittorio died.

The funeral was arranged by his assistant, not me.

Then she brought me everything he’d left behind.

As his wife, still legally, after everything, I inherited all of it.

Enough for me and my family for the rest of our lives.

In the end, the marriage certificate turned out to matter after all.

Just not in the way any of us had expected.

The chains were gone.

My life, perhaps, was finally beginning.