Chapter 2
Nobody on the terrace moved while Elena’s face filled the screen.
She said she did not yet know who ordered what was happening, but she knew somebody inside my family wanted me isolated. Bianca immediately called her paranoid. She said Elena had been suspicious of everyone near the end, that grief and motherhood had changed her.
I looked at Bianca and she stopped talking.
On-screen, Elena said old Bellaforte routes were reopening, private meetings were happening at Villa Aurelia, and Marco’s name kept appearing around them. That made me turn toward him. Two years ago, he told me the villa had been closed and unused for months.
It was my wife’s recording that finally showed me how carefully I had been lied to.
The second file opened to a hidden recording inside a private room at Villa Aurelia. Marco entered first. Bianca followed him. Then three older Bellaforte associates, men who were supposed to be retired after my father’s death, sat down at the table like they still owned a future inside my family.
One of them asked what would happen if I refused to restore the old structure.
Bianca smiled. “He’ll stop refusing once Elena stops filling his head.”
I did not react. I could not. My entire body had gone too cold for anger.
Marco shifted in the recording and told her to leave Elena out of it. Bianca replied that Elena was the problem. She said I started thinking differently after I married her. She said Elena made me sentimental, soft, convinced that blood did not excuse everything.
I remembered hearing echoes of those complaints before. Little things. Comments at dinner. Advice disguised as concern. Elena had warned me. I told myself my family was simply adjusting to a different way of leading.
I had been wrong.
When the recording ended, Bianca lifted her chin and said Elena had misunderstood everything. I ignored her and opened the next file.
This time Elena was alone. She looked exhausted. She said she had confronted Bianca privately and learned enough to understand what they were trying to do. They wanted me to stop trusting my wife before they ever tried to remove her from my life. If they could make her sound hysterical, controlling, emotional, then every warning she gave me would start to sound like more proof that she could not be believed.
That was the moment I understood the deepest humiliation in the whole thing.
May you like
They had not only lied to me.
They had taught me how to doubt the woman I loved with words they planted inside my own mouth.
