Isa

Marina was so used at this point to me calling her with doleful messages of doom and gloom. It was always something about how my marriage was horrible, how Lorenzo was horrible, and how much I was suffering. It was only natural that when I called her, the first thing she asked was what was wrong.

“Nothing’s wrong, Marina,” I said lightly.

“What happened?” she insisted.

“Again. Nothing. Lorenzo came home, and we talked about it.”

“And?”

“And it was all a misunderstanding.”

“Some misunderstanding. Why was his ex sending you nude pictures of the two of them? Were they fake?”

“Oh no. They were real,” I said.

Marina went silent before she started up again.

“Then why aren’t you here at my house where we can plan the next phase of your life and a twenty-something-year-old divorcée in New York City?”

I laughed. She was so dramatic. I was dramatic, too. Maybe that was why we were friends.

“No need, Marina. Still happily married.”

“Oh, so now you’re happy, are you? What changed? What could Lorenzo possibly tell you to make you take him back?”

“Well,” I began dramatically, “Elissa and Lorenzo are exes. They used to date ages ago, and that was when they took the pictures. She had kept them, and she sent them to me in a desperate and sneaky attempt to make me leave Lorenzo.”

“Wow. The things good women are driven to because of men,” she said loftily.

“I don’t know about good. Elissa’s a bitch. Point blank. Can I tell you what she did?”

“What?”

“She told Lorenzo that he had to go to her house to tell him something about his dad’s business, and when he was there, she made a pass at him.”

“Lorenzo told you all this?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“No reason. I’m just impressed by the honesty, I guess.”

“Oh my God, Marina. Is that you showing approval of Lorenzo?” I teased her.

She scoffed. “I’m not going to praise the man for doing the bare minimum that is expected of him. I’m just impressed that he would own up. He really has been faithful to you, hasn’t he?”

“He has. I had no reason to doubt him.”

“So he wasn’t having sex with Elissa. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t, or wouldn’t, or even hasn’t with other women.”

I sighed. “Marina, stop it.”

“I’m being realistic here. You trust him, Isa, but you have no real reason to. What’s stopping the guy from screwing you over if that is just what he wants to do one day?”

“We made vows to each other,” I said,

“Isa. Idealism is cute, but marriage vows are broken nearly as often as they are fulfilled,” she said. “Neither of you knew each other before you got married. You can’t tell me that you know this man, I mean, really know him after just this short amount of time.”

“I know that, Marina. I don’t need you to remind me. Say what you want about the marriage, but the fact is that he loves me. He loves me, and I love him. He said that he would never do anything knowing he would hurt me. He said that he was scared and unsure about being a dad, but he was going to give it his best shot for the baby and me. I trust what he says, and I want to give him a chance to prove himself.”

“How do you know he’s serious?”

“He asked me to marry him.”

“Did he forget that that has already happened,” she asked.

“No. We’re doing it again. We’re going to have another ceremony, this time for us. The other wedding was for our families. It was for our fathers to publically show that they were burying the hatchet and that they were going to stop trying to kill each other. This one is going to be for us.”

“I love you, Isa, and I am going to support you in whatever decision you make. You are the one who is married to him, and I understand that. I just want to know that you are sure about him.”

“From the beginning, Marina, I’ve been upset that this hasn’t been a real relationship. That we were set up and that we didn’t get a fair start and all that. It has felt more and more real as the days have gone by. I care about him, and he cares about me. I have to be able to trust him, and that means trusting him not to break my heart even when he is in a position to do so if he wanted to.”

“You trust him?”

“I do,” I said honestly.

“Then I suppose congratulations are in order,” she said grudgingly. I smiled. She always put up a fight, but I knew she would be there for me.

“It’s about time. I was about to think that maybe you wanted me to be calling to tell you that we had broken up.”

“Just because you love the guy, Isa, does not mean that I have to. I am going to trust your judgement on him, but the minute he wrongs you again, I’m out.”

I thanked her and hung the phone up. The news of our wedding was technically a secret. We hadn’t told anybody yet, and we weren’t really planning on telling anyone either. Marina was right. Congratulations were in order. I hadn’t felt this great in a while.

It was like nothing in the last few days had even happened.

It was like nothing in the past few months had even happened. So much of what I was afraid and insecure about with Lorenzo was Elissa and his past, and he had put my mind to rest. Whether or not he was sleeping with her still, or whether he was just married to me for show and really wanted to be with her...the answer was no. He was with me, and that was because he wanted to be. I was happy again.

Just like that.

That was all it took.

The feelings I had for Lorenzo were growing every day. He was the husband I hadn’t chosen but had managed to fall in love with. Our meeting, wedding, and the first month or so of our marriage was a whirlwind romance, but perhaps not in the traditional sense. People in normal relationships got to experience and get over this part of their relationship that was full of jealousy, uncertainty, and near break-ups before they decided to put a ring on it and make it official. We hadn’t. Our relationship was advanced, in that we were already a married couple, living together, sharing funds, and expecting a child, but we had still only just known each other for a short while.

We were married, but our marriage had the newness and exploration of a short-term dating relationship. This was not a bad thing; it was just a true thing. We couldn’t rush anything because that would have just been dishonest of us. We didn’t know each other the way a lot of people in relationships at our level knew each other. Part of me was a little sad about it, but the other part relished it. We had already said our vows, all we had to do now was enjoy each other—and that was not hard. Lorenzo was a fucking catch. Maybe the fact that we were married and not just dating was a factor that made us more willing to be there for each other and be more proactive about solving problems. There was a lot more at stake if we decided we didn’t want to figure things out.

Everything that had happened recently had just come and gone so quickly, any faster and I would have been knocked out. The rollercoaster of emotions alone was exhausting, but now, I had nothing to complain about. I had nothing to be angry, or sad, or scared about. Elissa had been neutralized. The stain that she had tried to make on our marriage and my growing trust of Lorenzo was gone. Completely wiped away because she had nothing.

My fear that he didn’t want the baby or want me was gone, too. He wanted us both, and he was going to do his best to make sure that he was what we both needed, the baby and me.

I was happy.

My husband loved me, I loved him, and we were happy.

Not only that. He had proposed to me. Proposed marriage to me because it had been a mess from the beginning. We had met each other and gotten married in the span of two weeks, and we had spent most of the beginning of our marriage hating each other and driving one another up the wall. It wasn’t fair. The second wedding would be a chance to do things over and hopefully get it right, or at the very least, get to do things our way.

Lorenzo was extremely laid back about the whole thing. He wanted to give me what I wanted, but understandably, he didn’t care too much for putting the event together. The wedding we had had before was undeniably gorgeous, but it wasn’t ours; it wasn’t for us.

I had a chance now—because the first time it had been taken away from me—to have the wedding that I had always dreamed of. I was already married to the man of my dreams so this second ceremony was just something nice we would get to experience together. Since the first wedding was all taken care of for me, I was overwhelmed with the sheer number of choices and things that had to be covered and taken into consideration.

Of course, there were the major things—like the venue—because the wedding had to take place somewhere—and the dress—because I had to get married in something, but there were also other finer points that were sort of up in the air.

How many guests were we going to have? Were we even going to have guests this time around? The point of having guests at your wedding was to share the moment with the people in your life who you loved and who were about to be directly affected by the couple’s decision to marry and to have witnesses. We didn’t need witnesses because all we wanted was a ceremony, legally we were already hitched. As far as inviting the people whom we loved to the wedding, what did that mean in terms of numbers? Would anyone even want to come? Did we want or need people there, judging our decision to do what we had just done all over again on our terms? Would Lorenzo’s mom find it insulting that I wanted to have another wedding after she had been so involved in the planning of the last one?

Really, though, when I thought about it, there wasn’t anyone that I absolutely wanted to have there, except maybe Marina. If that was the case, then a lot of the frills and things that were just for the sake of taking good wedding photos could go out the door.

Just because I didn’t necessarily want guests there didn’t mean that Lorenzo automatically felt the same way. I asked him one night over dinner. I had taken to cooking a lot more often since he seemed to like it so much.

“How’s the wedding planning going?” he had asked me.

“I wanted to ask you something about it,” I said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I need to know how many guests you want to invite,” I said.

“I told you, Isa. It’s whatever you want.”

“No, I'm not getting married to myself, Lorenzo. You need to help me out a little, at least throw me a bone or something. I don’t want to plan something that you won't like or something that doesn’t really reflect us as a couple and what we want.”

“Honestly?”

“Of course. Tell me.”

“I don’t know if we need anyone there,” he said.

“What did you think of the first wedding we had?” I asked him.

He shrugged.

“It was nice. Mom worked hard, and she had the help of the organizer. It was traditional, which I didn’t hate, but it was a little too much for my taste.”

“What is your taste? If we weren’t married at all and I asked you what the best possible wedding you could think of was, what would it be?” I asked. “If you had no one hounding you or breathing down your neck about what they wanted. What is Lorenzo Montorini’s dream wedding?” I asked him.

He smiled at the question. Did men think about this stuff as much as women did? Did they even care, or did they just put up with grand wedding ceremonies to make their brides happy.

“An afternoon at city hall and then a nice dinner out somewhere, our favorite restaurant,” he said. I frowned a little making him laugh.

“So unromantic,” I said, surprised. He didn’t strike me as the type at all to want to go small. Maybe it was that whole ‘the wedding day is for the bride’ mentality that had him like that...but still. I had expected him to at least have wanted it to take place in a cathedral or a chapel somewhere.

“Are you upset?”

“No, just surprised. I thought you’d want something grand and flashy. I mean,” I motioned to the house and the things around us, “you do like the finer things.” He smiled.

“I don’t know, Isa. I just think that weddings aren’t for everyone, you know what I mean? If I want to profess my love to you and promise to be with you and only you for the rest of my life and yours, really we are the only two people who need to be there. I don’t need to prove my love and devotion to anyone else but you. Why? You want a big wedding?”

“No...” I trailed off. “I was just a little worried about how people would react to us getting married again. I just think it would bring up a lot of questions, and maybe the people who had come before wouldn’t want to come again.”

“We don’t need them,” he said.

He was right. We didn’t.

“You want it to be just us?” I asked.

“Are you alright with that?”

I nodded my assent. The additional people weren’t necessarily anything that we needed. A personal ceremony between the two of us would be nice.

“Would you do something for me?” I asked him.

“Whatever you want.”

I smiled at how generous he was. There was something that I wanted to ask him about the wedding, and I had felt a little silly wanting it. During the first wedding, we had read the stock vows that you could hear at any old wedding that you attended. The whole ‘sickness and health, til’ death do us part’ thing which was beautiful and traditional, but it was still, you know... a little pedestrian. It sort of had to be that way because we were total strangers and there was nothing that either of us could have come up with to vow to one another because we didn’t know each other. Things were different now. Something that I had wanted—since I was old enough to know that it was something you could have—was personalized vows.

Lorenzo worked every day. He had bigger things to worry about than what I wanted him to promise me he would do on our second wedding day. Really, what I was requesting, was that the man take the time out of his already busy day to write up a love letter to me. It would be okay if he didn’t want to do them, but I really wanted the answer to be yes.

“Will you write your own vows?” I asked hopefully.

“I’m not really a poet, babe,” he said.

“You don’t have to be. You just have to write what you want to say to me. It doesn’t have to rhyme, or be poetic, it just has to be honest.”

He sighed before looking at me.

“Do you promise not to laugh at what I come up with?”

“It shouldn’t make me laugh, Lorenzo. It should make me cry,” I said.

He smiled and said he would do his best. That was all I wanted him to do. Since the ceremony would be just us, there was a lot of stuff that a traditional wedding would have that we just wouldn’t have to get. We didn’t need a bridal party or groomsmen or a Mass, we had covered all that at the first wedding.

Lorenzo’s mom had done a great job with the ceremony, but there was one thing that we hadn’t done, besides writing our own vows, which I wished we had had the chance to—and that was wedding photographs. We could do it after our second ceremony, but frankly, I wanted to wear my first wedding dress. It was much more beautiful than anything I would be able to get to fit me when we finally had the second ceremony, and at the moment, I wasn’t showing. The window during which I was pregnant but still at my pre-pregnancy weight and size was going to close any day now and I wanted to get back in that dress before I was too big to do it.

I had felt beautiful in that dress—despite the circumstances—and Lorenzo had thought so, too. If nothing else, it was the best part of that otherwise harrowing day, and I wanted to immortalize the dress in pictures that we took when we were actually happy about being together. Because the photographer was only available during the week, Lorenzo took the day off of work and booked the church where we had been married to take our wedding portraits.

This was what it felt like to be getting married. I relished the feeling of excitement I had about everything. Though our wedding was going to be so small, it meant so much. I had missed the opportunity to feel excited about getting married, and Lorenzo was allowing me to have that, which I loved him for. He wasn’t picky. He gave his opinion when I asked for it, but overall he let me choose everything.

The one thing he did do for me was get me a ring.

It was like because he hadn’t proposed to me himself the first time we got married, he wanted to propose to me as many times as possible. Maybe he was trying to see whether I would eventually say “no” or something, but I didn’t. I said “yes.”

He gave me the ring when we were in bed one night. He got up and fished the ring box out of his suit jacket that he had been wearing that day, and he asked me to marry him, again. The ring was a piece of art. Absolutely gorgeous. Unlike the wedding band that I was wearing already and the many pieces of jewelry he had gotten me in general since we had gotten together, the ring had come from his mother. It was an heirloom.

It had a 1920s art deco style and the rocks were diamonds, white and pink. The ring had belonged to his grandmother, and he wanted me to have it.

The wins just kept coming after that.

Neither Lorenzo nor I had had children before, so neither of us knew what to expect when we went to the hospital for the first time. The baby was obviously not that far along, so they wouldn’t be able to tell us the sex, but they did give us a due date. Our kid would be born in the winter.

I loved seeing Lorenzo’s face when the baby showed up on the screen. It was tiny. The obstetrician had to point out its little arms and legs, but it was there and it was ours. In approximately eight months, I’d be holding the baby in my arms.

Perhaps it was true what people said about struggle making a couple stronger. Lorenzo and I had made a full one hundred and eighty degree turnaround from the couple that we had been when we got married. We were still, somehow, the couple that was about to get married, but this time, we wanted to be those people. We lived together, and I couldn’t wait to see my husband when he came home from work every day. I hadn’t been able to stand his hands on me unless I was drunk, and now I wanted him every single night, on top of me and inside of me.

We finally knew what wedded bliss was because we were finally living it.

I should have known that something fucked up was just around the corner. I should have foreseen that it wouldn’t last.

I had just come out of the shower and was drying my hair and getting dressed to go downstairs and have dinner with Lorenzo when he got home. Over the sound of the hairdryer, I couldn’t hear the phone ring the first time. It rang again as I was getting ready to go downstairs. It was my mother.

“Mom?”

“Isa? Honey, I’ve been trying to call you, where are you?” My mother hadn’t played too much of a role in my marriage and what had come after that. It wasn’t like she had disowned me or anything, but she had stepped back from her role as “mother” because Lorenzo’s mother was supposed to have it. I had been “given away” at the wedding after all. She had largely kept her opinion of the marriage and what she thought about Lorenzo and his family to herself. Thinking about it, it was likely because she had just felt powerless to do anything when it came to my dad and his business. I couldn’t imagine the discussions they must have had before I was eventually married, talking about how they would tell me and arguing about whether it was a good idea in the long run.

She obviously had something to say to me then, and it was something urgent from the sound of her voice. If it wasn’t urgent, then it was something I was probably not going to like hearing very much.

“I’m at home, Mom. Sorry I didn’t pick up. I was in the shower.”

Her silence after that confirmed to me that something was wrong before she had to. If it wasn’t serious, she could have just left me a text message, asking me to hit her up when I could to chat, or to make plans to meet or whatever. There was a way that you talked to people when you just wanted to talk and this was not it.

“What’s going on, Mom?”

“Isa, honey. You better sit down.” I didn’t. I paced up and down the room, wondering what it was that she wasn’t telling me.

“What’s going on, Mom? Tell me. Did something happen?”

“Honey, I wanted to be the one who told you... your father was found dead outside the restaurant last night. He was murdered.”

There was a reason why people asked you to sit down before they broke bad news to you, and it wasn’t just to be funny. For a second, I felt faint and had to steady myself on the bed before I sat. My father had been what? It had happened where? What was she talking about? I had heard her, but I wasn’t sure that I was certain about what it was that she was telling me. She was saying something that didn’t make sense and that sounded like a lie. While I didn’t want to believe it, it was not something that anybody, especially not my own mother, would say to me in jest about her husband, my father.

Dead? Was she sure?

I sat on the bed and held the phone to my ear in silence.

“What?” I asked dumbly.

“Your father is dead, Isa. He was killed. It looks like another gang did it. One of his enemies.”

I shook my head like she was there to see me do it.

No.

That was impossible.

My father wasn’t dead. My father couldn’t die. He just couldn’t.

“Isa, are you still there?”

My mother’s voice snapped me out of it.

“Umm, yeah... listen, Mom. I have to go,” I said quickly, hanging the phone up. I felt rotten leaving her hanging like that, but what the hell, she had just told me that my father was dead. I repeated the phrase to myself mentally, modulating it differently every time so I could try and process it.

There was no way this was happening. This was my father we were talking about here, not some guy on the street. My dad. Francisco D’Agostino. He had been larger than life and intimidating for as long as I had known him, but he was my father. I loved him, and he always did anything for me. There was no way that he was dead. Men like him didn’t just die. Of course, the man wasn’t immortal, nobody was, but I couldn’t believe that a man who was a larger than life and as strong as my father had just dropped dead. He was the kind of person who you expected to get up to extremely advanced age before anything started getting to him. He was healthy as a horse. He had no good reason to be dead.

Except of course another person’s bullets.

The next thing I did was nearly a reflex at this point. I called Lorenzo. What the hell was I even going to say to him? Was there a chance that he knew and he hadn’t told me? In the event that he did know, then so what? What would he do about it? There was nothing he could do but be there—and that was what I needed. I just needed there to be another person with me in this house before I lost my mind completely. I waited for four rings before the call ended because he hadn’t picked up. Where was he? Why did I want him here?

It was about an hour before he got home. I know because I was counting. I heard him hollering from downstairs. He called my name, looking for me until he finally made his way up and into our room. I had assumed a seat on the bed, and when I saw him, I cracked. Whatever had been holding me together previously let go, and the weight of my shock and sorrow flowed through me completely out of control. I suddenly felt his arms around me as he held me.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, but now I did, and the truth felt like knives. It felt like unbearable pressure pressing down on me from every direction. My dad. He was gone. I could hear Lorenzo’s voice telling me it was okay and to calm down. I appreciated his being there, but that didn’t bring my father back. I cried until I tired myself out, resting on the bed with Lorenzo beside me. His fingers ran through my hair in an effort to calm me down.

“Did you know?” I asked him.

“I just found out today. I wanted to be the one who told you in person.”

“My mom told me. She called when I was in the shower,” I told him.

“Did she tell you the details?” he asked.

Did I really want to know them?

“What details?” I asked. “It happened outside Campania.”

“The details on who might have done it.”

I sat up and looked at him.

“Mom said it was a rival group or family. Do you know who did it?”

“There’s a chance that some of my people or my father’s people had something to do with it,” he said. I looked at him stunned because he wasn’t making sense.

“But... but, how? I thought that... I thought that we got married so that things like this wouldn’t happen anymore.”

“I spoke with my men as soon as I found out. Unless one of them is lying, there is no way any of them were behind it. I know my father wouldn’t try something like this after going through the trouble of settling his differences with your father with the two of us. Something’s not right.”

I looked at him at a loss for what to say. What could I say? He had just told me that my dad was dead and there was a chance that the people he associated with had something to do with it.

“Isa? Say something,” he said to me. I looked at him sadly. I had nothing.

“I... I just need a minute,” I said to him.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked.

I thought about it. I had just heard that my father had been murdered, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a chance that the Montorinis, of which Lorenzo was one, had something to do with it. Instinctively, I knew that that couldn’t be the case. I desperately wanted it not to be the case because what the hell was I supposed to do if I found out Lorenzo or his father, my father-in-law had organized for the murder of my dad? I felt like someone had just crumbled the earth below my feet and that I was falling. I felt alone and scared, and I didn’t want to sleep in that bed alone.

“No. Stay.”

It was just like the night that he had run me a bath and sat in it with me. We lay on the bed and Lorenzo wrapped his arms around me. We were silent. At some point, I drifted off to sleep. Maybe when I woke up, this would all just be a dream.