Lucia nodded. “I saw it myself. There’s no way he survived.”
You’re pretty adventurous when it comes to food, so I don’t know if there’s anything that you don’t like, but I know you like authentic Mexican food, specifically tamales. It’s the main reason I always sneak some to you.
Your favorite color is sky blue, your favorite animal is a panda, and your favorite singer is Lianne La Havas. Philippa, my love, I know everything about you, and if there is anything I don’t know, I can’t wait to learn.
“Gianni is dead for certain,” Natalia Cavetti said.
“Good riddance,” Giorgio Bonifacio replied.
What you have probably already seen by the time you’re reading this, is I’ve changed my father’s plans. What was meant to be a post-wedding kidnapping and slaughter of my brother, has turned into a very vibrant, public display. I wanted all of the gathered guests to see me acting of my own accord, and for my siblings to start unraveling the mystery of my father’s cruel intentions, so I made sure to shoot Romeo in a non-fatal place. If they see me, alive and well, they’ll know the Bonifacios died for nothing, and they’re smart, I’m praying they start to connect the dots.
Once this has blown over, I will contact you on the phone I gave you to arrange a way for us to escape this life forever. Let’s go get married under the Japanese Sakura trees and never think about this family again. We can start our own.
One of the guards came storming down the church hall. “Clear everyone out. The wedding is proceeding, and get the word out that the traitorous Gianni is dead.”
Know this. Nothing in this world matters to me if I can’t have you. I’m making this attempt to take my father down, and then I’m turning my back to it. The only life I’m worried about is the one I want to start with you. I’m going to sign my full name at the bottom of this letter so that you know how much you mean to me. I had to change my last name when I died, I’m no longer a Cavetti.
I am counting down the days until I can hold you in my arms again.
Yours and only yours,
Gianni Rotianno Varberio
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t catch my breath. The Cavettis and Bonifacios were a storm around me and I felt like I was in the eye. Seeing Gianni’s confession on the page, signing his first name with my last name, it knotted my throat so hard my chest started to contract. My nose burned, my eyes blurred, and my stomach felt sick. It can’t have been part of his plan for Marcello to come after him, Romeo was the only one who had ever been involved. If Marcello was saying he was dead and Lucia was confirming it, how could it not be true?
Gianni was dead.
I couldn’t show signs of my true emotions. I bit down on my lip and forced the tears to stay back with everything in me. I imagined the last time I saw him, the last chance we had to be together that I blew because I let Angelo Cavetti twist up my mind and make me doubt the only thing I’d ever been sure about. Because of that, because of him, the man I loved was dead and he was never coming back. I had the last letter he’d ever write. A phone that would never ring.
It made me hollow.
There was nothing left for me. The one thing that kept me going for the past decade was gone and what was I going to do.
How am I supposed to go on without you, Gianni?
The rest of the wedding was a blur. Angelo demanded Romeo and Lucia resume their nuptials immediately, which they did with blissful smiles on their faces. Their siblings stood by, each paired off themselves, hiding love, but getting to stand next to the people they cared most about.
What did I have? I had nothing.
I was made to carry the remains of Lucia’s wedding back to the estate. She exchanged jubilant kisses with her husband and cried because he was alive when she believed he was dead. When had she come to love him really and truly? How could she find peace with a man I’d watched treat her like trash? She was pregnant. Starting a family with the man she loved.
She had everything that I would never have. It wasn’t fair.
Weak and exhausted, I made my way down to my bed when the craziness had calmed. I pulled the box of letters I had from Gianni from under my bed and opened it. I meant to only add the letter to it that I’d gotten from him at the wedding, but I found myself pouring through them, reading every word he’d ever written to me.
How could I ever doubt his love when it was in everything he’d ever said? From the time when we were just friends until the time we became lovers, the words never changed. They were always warm, always comforting, always familiar. Gianni’s passion for me existed long before he ever touched me for the first time, it simply took us a while to figure out. We had growing to do, maturing to do, and then when we were ready, it struck us and took us on a journey of love I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.
I’d never get that back.
“Philippa?”
When a voice called my name, I got so frightened that I dropped the box of letters. Papers scattered across the floor, including the letter of love that Gianni had presented me with just earlier that day. I’d looked into his eyes. He was standing mere feet from me.
And now he was gone.
Alegna rushed over and knelt down on the floor. She quickly started collecting them and stacking them back in the box. I saw them strewn about, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. It was like the life force had been sucked from my body. It was taking great effort just to keep myself breathing, let alone do anything else. I watched as someone else handled the words that Gianni had written to me, the ones that had been proof enough that he loved me. I didn’t want anyone else touching them, but I couldn’t get the words to come out. All I could do was watch as Alegna loaded them back into the box.
Ten letters. Twenty. A hundred. Two hundred. Letters dating back ten years. Simple ones that just told me how his day was going, and deeply romantic ones that went on for two or three pages of Gianni using all the beautiful words in his lexicon to describe me.
