“But you weren’t conceived in violence!” I explode. “Your motherchoseto be with Giuseppe. She married him, she loved him—or at least she tried to. You were wanted. You were the product of a relationship, even if it wasn’t a good one. I’m the product ofrape. I’m what happens when a monster takes what he wants by force.”
Matteo draws back sharply, pain flashing in his eyes.
“But it didn’t come from you, did it? It came fromhim. From Giuseppe. It’s genetic. It’s who I am at the most fundamental level.” I’m talking faster now, the words tumbling out of me like water from a broken dam. “Every time I’ve wanted to hurt someone who crossed me, every time I’ve felt that cold satisfaction when I won an argument or got revenge on someone who wronged me—that’s not learned behavior. That’s inheritance.”
“Please, Bianca?—”
“And the worst part?” I’m crying now, angry tears that I can’t stop. “The absolute worst part is that you knew. You’ve known my entire life, and you let me believe in this fairy tale where I was your daughter and Sophia was pregnant before she met you but you married her anyway and Giuseppe was my grandfather who built an empire for his family’s future.”
I wipe my face with the back of my hand, smearing tears and probably mascara across my cheek. “But that’s not what happened, is it? Giuseppe didn’t build an empire for his family. He built it for himself, and he took whatever he wanted along the way. Including my mother. Including me.”
“He didn’t take you,” Matteo says desperately. “You aremine. I told you this two years ago when you found out I wasn’t your biological father. The moment you were born, I chose to be your father. Iamyour father.”
“You chose to lie to me.” My voice is flat now, empty of everything except exhaustion and betrayal. “You looked me in the eye and lied about the most basic truth of my existence.”
“To protect you?—”
“From what? From knowing that my real father was a monster? Newsflash, Matteo—I already knew Giuseppe was a monster. Everyone knows Giuseppe was a monster. You didn’t protect me from anything except the truth. The truth you were too cowardly to tell me.”
I turn toward the door, suddenly desperate to get out of this room, away from their faces and their explanations and their fucking sympathy.
“Where are you going?” Bella asks, her voice small and scared.
“I don’t know.” And I don’t.
I have no idea where to go or what to do or how to process the fact that everything I thought I knew about myself was wrong. “I need…I need to think. I need to figure out who the hell I am now that I know I’m not who I thought I was.”
“Bianca, please don’t leave,” Matteo says, and there’s so much pain in his voice that for a second I almost turn around and let him hug me and tell me everything’s going to be okay like he used to when I was little and had nightmares.
But then I remember that those nightmares were probably about Giuseppe—about my real father—and even my subconscious knew something was wrong with the story I’d been told.
“I can’t look at you right now,” I say without turning around. “I can’t look at any of you and pretend this is okay. That nineteenyears of lies is something I can just get over because you meant well.”
“Bianca—”
“No.” I spin around, and the fury is back, hot and sharp and consuming. “You don’t get to ‘Bianca’ me anymore. You don’t get to use that voice—that father voice—because you’re not my father. You gave up the right to comfort me the day you decided to build my entire life on a lie.”
The words hit him exactly how I wanted them to, and part of me—the part that’s apparently Giuseppe’s daughter—feels satisfied by his pain.
Wants to hurt him more, wants to make him feel a fraction of what I’m feeling right now.
“You want to know what the real tragedy is?” I ask, swallowing against the lump in my throat. “It’s not that Giuseppe raped my mother. It’s not that I’m the product of violence. It’s that the one person in the world I trusted to always tell me the truth turned out to be the biggest liar of all.”
I turn and walk toward the door, ignoring Bella’s quiet sobs and Antonio’s uncomfortable shuffling.
“I need to get out of here,” I say to no one in particular. “I need to go somewhere where I can figure out who I am without everyone looking at me like I’m about to break.”
“It’s not safe,” Matteo starts.
“I don’t give a fuck about safe!” I whirl around one more time, and I can see him recoil at the language, at the fury in my voice. “Safe would have been telling me the truth. Safe would havebeen letting me grow up knowing exactly what I was instead of letting me live in a fantasy.”
“Please,” he whispers, and he looks so broken that for a moment I almost cave.
But then I remember that this is the same man who lied to me for my entire life, and the moment passes.
“I’ll come back when I can look at you without wanting to hurt you,” I say, and I mean it.
Right now, the fury is so bright and hot inside me that I’m afraid of what I might say or do if I stay. “But right now, I need to be anywhere but here.”
