The silent room, sobered by the above three words-her best friend-beeped, as the world ceased to exist for me. It was not just crack in the foundation of my life; it was a seismic event that leveled the entire structure, leaving nothing but dust and ruin. My mother, my gentle, kind mother who taught me how to paint and smelled of vanilla and old books, was a traitor. A serpent. A woman who smiled in the face of her best friend while stealing her fiancé. The photograph felt like it was burning into the skin of my palm. No longer was it a simple snapshot of some forgotten past. It was a scene of crime, and my parents were the criminals.
Such a wave of nausea swept over me that I had to support myself by grabbing onto the couch lest I fell. The cold atmosphere of the penthouse was now suddenly thin and unbreathable air; memories of my parents were rewritten, rewritten through this appallingly new lens. Those occasional unexplained spells of sadness in my mother that I had chalked up to a gentle melancholy-was it guilt? It was due to the entire thing that we did not have old friends, that there were no stories about how my parents met: it was not privacy; it was denial and that part of family life that was shameful and scandalous.
And then my father. My weak, gambling, eternally failing father, he had always been the one I pitied and resented for not being able to provide or be brave. And now, for the first time, I tried to understand him. Has his cowardice always been so or was it from a single catastrophic act of betrayal? Did he spend his life's money at card tables to chase ghosts named Claudia and Isabella Moretti, running from the true debt he owed?
"I don't want to believe it," I whispered, voice pleading now for it not to be true. I glanced at Sofia, scrutinizing for a flaw in her story, for a crack of uncertainty. "People fall in love, Sofia. It happens. Maybe- maybe Claudia was cruel to her. Maybe my father was saving her." I was fabricating a tragic romance and casting my parents as star-crossed lovers to save myself from the truth that they were simply villains.
Sofia had the expression of profound and weary contempt. "Love?" It was only disgust from her lips. "Do you think love is an excuse for such treachery? Claudia Moretti adored Elena. She treated her like a sister. She confided her every hope and fear in her. And in return, your mother sank a knife into her back and twisted. Your father, rather than honoring the word that would have united two great families, chose to follow a fleeting impulse, plunging us back into a war that cost lives. There is no honor in that. There is no romance. There is only selfishness, weakness, and betrayal."
These savage, definite words rejected any last chance for desperate fictions I had. My gaze fell back onto the photograph-to the two women, so closely resembling each other, whose lives were so grievously intertwined. An even more exquisitely horrifying thought began to bloom in the wasteland of my mind.
"Is father the reason? The air was too thin to breathe, and I felt that I couldn't breathe. Voice barely audible, I said, "Mother, father used to say that Isabella and you have such a resemblance. So was that the reason? Was it... father... because she looked like the woman his fiancée was closest to?"
Was my own mother a substitute? A doppelgänger for the powerful, unattainable Isabella Moretti, the woman who championed the union, the sister of the family patriarch? Was my father's 'love' just another symptom of the same obsession that now held me captive? Was I the daughter of a woman who was herself a living ghost for another man?
A small, cruel smile flicked across Sofia's lips. "One can only speculate on your father's... proclivities," she said, leading with insinuation. "It is, however, a matter of record that Lorenzo Romano has always had a dangerous fixation on the Moretti family. In every sense of the word."
She had not needed confirming it. The seed is planted. The lie held in construct conjoined in birthed existence.
Just as I felt like almost really shattering, there were those little thud sounds on marble announcing Dante's return. He walked into the room, all the bloodsudden voiding the air. He read the scene: me, pallid and broken on the couch; Sofia, standing victorious; the incriminating photograph lying formidably on the cushion beside me. It was always sublime. He had let Sofia break me, and now he was here to inspect the pieces.
He moved again with that lethally smooth maneuver and paused in front of me. He didn't speak. He just bent down and plucked the photograph from my lifeless grasp. He stared at it for quite some time, stroking the image of his mother with his index finger. Then, he raised his cold, dark eyes to mine. There was no pity; there was only the hard glint of vindication.
"Now you know," he said, his voice low. "History's lies are for the living to make right." He gestured from the photograph to me. "You are the one now making possible the erasure of the past lies by the truth of the present. And you," he said, his gaze pinning me, suffocating me, "you, Isabella, are the living truth."