Chapter 12 - The Engagement Was a Job
Ethan loved telling people we met by chance.
A coffee shop. Rain outside. One empty chair.
Cute story.
Complete lie.
Natalie found the payment records within thirty minutes. Two years before Ethan proposed to me, a consulting company owned by Silas Trent had begun paying his debts. Credit cards. Student loans. Rent.
Then payments increased whenever Ethan traveled with me to visit my mother.
He hadn't loved me badly.
He had investigated me professionally.
That somehow hurt worse.
"I need one minute alone," I said.
Lorenzo followed me anyway.
I turned on him. "I said alone."
"And I'm ignoring you."
"That's not charming."
"Wasn't trying to be."
I made it to the pantry before my body gave up pretending. I sank onto a stool and cried so hard I couldn't breathe.
Not because I still loved Ethan.
Because every insecurity he had planted suddenly had a price tag.
The dresses he criticized. The food he monitored. The friends he pushed away. All of it had kept me smaller, quieter, easier to search.
Lorenzo crouched in front of me.
"Look at me."
"No."
"Amelia."
I looked.
"He did not make you weak," Lorenzo said. "He needed you to believe you were weak because he couldn't control you otherwise."
I laughed through tears. "That sounds suspiciously like therapy."
"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation."
I touched his face.
This time neither of us stopped.
The kiss was brief, shaky, and nothing like the dramatic nonsense in movies. It tasted like coffee and fear and six weeks of not saying what we meant.
Then Marco knocked once and entered anyway.
"Sorry. National emergency."
I wiped my face. "You people have terrible timing."
He handed me a photograph found in Ethan's old storage locker.
It showed my father standing beside my mother outside a bank.
Dad was handing her five folded pages.
On the back, he had written one address.
A safe-deposit branch in downtown Milwaukee.
We drove there under federal escort.
The box contained the missing ledger pages.
And a second item.
A signed marriage certificate.
The groom was Vittorio Duca.
The bride was not Lorenzo's mother.
It was Bianca Romano's mother.
May you like
Which meant Bianca wasn't just another failed bride.
She was Lorenzo's half-sister.
