My husband left me on the side of the road with these words: “You’re worthless to anyone.” But an hour later, a limousine he’d only seen in movies pulled up in front of me…
“Sell. And please, Clara, without your dramatic sighs,” the voice of Alberto, my husband, cut through the air as I looked out the window at the old chestnut trees. The same ones under which, as a child, I hid slips of paper with secrets.
“Alberto, I told you… we agreed not to reopen this topic.”
“Agreed? I didn’t agree with anyone. I just gave you time to accept the inevitable.”
I walked through the apartment I inherited from my grandmother, running my finger along the dusty piano lid as if evaluating merchandise ready for sale.
“For me, this place isn’t just an apartment. It’s memory.”
“You can’t live off memory. I need capital.” “Or would you rather we remain trapped forever on an office salary?”
He knew how to hit where it hurt the most: the guilt.
The fear of not being a good wife, of holding back his future. “But I promised my grandmother I’d never sell…”
Alberto laughed coldly:
“Promises to the d:ead don’t help me pay bills. I promised myself I’d be successful.
And that means breaking free from this cage that smells of mothballs and the past.”
His gaze crushed me against the chair like an iron weight. “Understand, Clara?, it’s the only right decision for our family.”
“Our family.” He always used that phrase when he wanted something: when he needed a loan for his car, when he made me give up a trip with my friends. “I can’t, Alberto,” I said quietly, but he heard it.
“Can’t you? Don’t you understand that without me you’re a zero?”
Nobody! Who would want you with your absurd principles and your promises to phantoms?”
He didn’t shout.
He said it calmly, as if passing judgment. And that made it even more terrifying. In the following days, he played the role of the perfect husband.
He brought me fresh juices, sent me tender messages. But I knew: it was his old tactic. First, hit.
Then, lull me to sleep with false displays of affection. The climax came when he entered the house with an elegantly dressed man: Riccardo Bianchi, a real estate appraiser. “Just a friend,” he said with his fake smile.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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