If it weren't for that thick stack of flight tickets, I could have confidently dismissed Don Ferrante's warning that "he doesn't love you as much."
No wonder he was always out of touch at the end of each month.
Turns out, he was busy traveling thousands of miles to be with Elara.
For two whole years, I felt like a fool, desperately racing to master the cipher work and prove my value to the Ferrante operation, just to carve out time to fly back and see him.
Those brief meetings after long flights were once the happiest moments of my life.
Yet, my cross-ocean love, in the face of that stack of tickets Ansel cherished, had become a joke.
As I made my way to the proposal site, I tried to convince myself that maybe he had traveled to Palermo for business. A sit-down with an allied family. A supply-chain problem. Anything.
When I saw him offering the blood-bound ring to Elara, the very woman who had once tormented me, it became clear why he hadn't visited me despite the mere hundred kilometers between us.
Elara had barred him from seeing me, leaving him to send word through intermediaries, stories of longing and sorrow to explain his absence.
He knew exactly how much Elara and I were sworn enemies.
After my father remarried, Vittoria Corsetti and her daughter became the most persistent shadows of my childhood. The beatings behind closed doors. The isolation. The burning of my mother's letters. All of it hidden behind the Valente name while the name still meant something.
I had imagined countless scenarios over the past two years of our separation.
Ansel might fall for someone else, I thought, but I never expected him to fall for Elara. I never anticipated that he would go so far as to agree to let me be humiliated at the union ceremony just to please her.
I submerged myself in a warm bath, the heat gradually stopping my trembling. The water stilled around me. My breathing slowed until it was almost nothing, a long, measured silence, the kind that comes when a decision has already been made and the body is simply catching up.
Then, Ansel's call came in.
"Serafina, where are you? I'm already at the seaside park!"
I stayed silent.
Ansel grew anxious.
"Serafina, what's wrong? Are you upset?"
"Where are you? I'll come get you right now."
He remained as attentive and careful as ever, able to pick up on my emotions and offer comfort.
"I'm at the estate. I don't want to go to the park today."