Dean was sitting at the kitchen table back at Stella's, surrounded by his surrogate family. After Adam and Isabella had swooped away from the scene of their crime, a kindly tourist had helped him back down the tower. Thankfully, the young man had no idea who he was so he might not see himself in the tabloids tomorrow. He spent over an hour wandering Pisa looking for Hazel. He knew the chances of finding her were slim but he had to try. His heart broke at what she must be thinking. He'd called her every hour since, but she wasn't answering her phone. He'd contemplated going straight to the house to speak to her, but he needed to get himself together first and figure out what he would do. He couldn't bring her all of his problems and dump them on her. Especially when he hadn't even spoken to her yet about what Indigo had told him. That would need to be his first order of business and the thought of it was breaking his heart.

“This man sounds like a very bad man. Seems like you should have known, no?” Atillio was slicing one of Stella's cakes and passing around slices. He'd insisted it was a cake-for-breakfast kind of day, but no one was eating.

“Pfft! I didn’t know. I fell for it hook, line and sinker." Sara was standing with the baby on her hip trying to keep him from dropping his slimy, half eaten banana on the kitchen floor. "I believed every word he said - until I didn’t.”

“I guessed there was something bad going on between the two of you. Why didn’t you tell me?” Dean asked.

“Look Dean. I love you. And one reason I love you so much is that even though you are a movie star, you are so not-Hollywood. You never developed a BS radar. You got sucked in by every compliment, every schmooze, every beautiful girl. You wanted to find a home. I get that but you didn’t see things as they really were.” The baby dropped the banana. Stella swooped to pick it up and put a new one in his hands before he realized it had gone. “If I had told you not to trust Adam… if I had told you he wasn’t a nice guy… would you have believed me?”

Dean thought back to everything he had been through with Adam. No matter how hard he poked in every nook and cranny of his memory he couldn’t find a single moment where he had doubted his best friend. And why would he? Dean would be nothing without Adam. Adam had plucked him out of obscurity and given him success and wealth, and a sense of belonging he’d never had before. That was, until recently. He realized now that he'd known whose voice he'd heard when he'd talked to Isabella soon after he’d arrived. Deep down he had known it was Adam at his house and he'd known why he was there. He just didn’t want to believe it.

“But he hates Isabella. He always has. He tells me all the time.”

Sara rolled her eyes. “Methinks the man doth protest too much. I can’t tell you how many times I had to tell him to shut up about her before it finally sank in and I came out here. I was trying to decide whether to let you figure that one for yourself too, but once you fell for Hazel, it didn’t seem worth it.”

“How long?” Dean pulled his hand through his hair, it was tangled from the buckets of terrified sweat he'd spilled on the tower. He had to put that out of his mind. Even thinking about the height of it made him feel sick.

“Well since before I came here, so a few months at least. I think they’ve been trying to figure out the best way to extract you from the scene without causing an industry uproar for a while. The headline, “Movie Star quits the business and moves to Italy to find himself” reads a lot better than, “Movie’s star’s girlfriend runs off with his best friend and manager.” Even in Hollywood that would be a tough stain to wash out.”

“Huh,” Dean said. “No wonder she wasn’t interested in making a happy home. She probably hates that house.”

Sara gave him a sad look and shrugged. "I don't think that woman knows what a happy home looks like." She moved the baby to her other hip. Dean could tell she had something else she wanted to say.

"What?" He said. "Don't worry, Sara I can take it. I don't think anything could shock me after yesterday."

"Adam's been meeting with Christopher Brooks for months. Since before your incident and before I left. Ed Hardy didn't want you out Dean, Adam did. He wanted his hands on those royalties. Everything Ed Hardy thinks has been planted there by Adam."

Dean's world had spun off of its axis since the moment he stepped out of the stairwell on the tower yesterday. How had he not seen all of this? How had he not known? He'd been blinded by his past with Adam and like Sara said, he'd only been seeing what he wanted to see. The killer was that Adam seemed to believe his behaviour was justified. After that tourist had helped him down the tower he'd run into Adam and Isabella. They were climbing into a shining black Lexus that had appeared out of nowhere and swept up to the edge of the lawn. Adam had called out a bunch of platitudes about how he would call and they could work on something else, and their friendship meant everything, but Dean had seen through the handsome exterior and right into his black soul. He'd just shaken his head and went to look for Hazel.

“The question is, Deany, what now?” Dean loved how Atillio called him Deany, apparently Sara hadn’t clued him in to the fact that it was a pet name. She smiled over at Dean in apology. He gave her a shrug and a sheepish grin back. He liked it.

"I have to talk to Hazel." He couldn't get her distraught face out of his head.

“Do you love her?” Stella asked, poking at the cake plate in front of him. “Mangia.”

Dean didn’t bother pretending. What was the point? This was his family. “Yes. I do. I’ve never loved anyone more. But how can I explain everything to her? It’s so complicated. She'd never believe me. She’ll just think I’m some flighty movie star ready to conquer and move on. She thinks I was making out with Isabella on the tower and that I didn’t follow her when she ran.”

Atillio put his warm hand on Dean’s arm and his old eyes twinkled. “I think I have a plan that will work. A molti, molti buono plan.”