The photos portrayed such a beautiful lie, she could almost convince herself it was true. There, cradled in the safety of capable arms and the butterfly’s weight of pressure of lips against her bare cheek, she no longer looked like the lost girl of the Covello family tree but something saved— Marcus Acosta had been the one to hold onto her hand and lead her out of the desert. The milky stone of his family ring that threatened to slip past the finger joint was a fake tribute to the deception they’d weaved, her mother had cooed the loudest when she saw it in place on her hand, her father dabbing at a tear that threatened to slip from his eyes. “You look bloated,” Len chirped wickedly, “like a tick. You should cut the salt.” Another lie, but she felt easy telling this one. She sent the images to them all, along with a message typed out in her shaky written Italian, grammar garbled and words misspelled where they weren’t outright replaced with English. There was so much false love in the photo no one would notice. She wondered if she should show Rory the results later, how moon-eyed she could become when necessary, crowing something about Oscar winning performances and Academy nominations.
She lingered in his lap, replying to the messages in the group chat for her family (her cousin asking when they would visit, an aunt asking if Marcus was eating right), but when she spoke she remembered herself, picking herself up off his lap and settling back into her seat, crossing her legs deliberately at the knee. She pulled a pen from her bag, holding it out for him without lifting her eyes from her screen. “My last act as your dutiful wife.” When they first met him, she couldn’t stand the space shared between them. Her parents were deliberate with their intentions, and she craved violence in retaliation— the violence of a spring thaw, ice breaking in large floes on a river, fire raging in the kindle-dry century old forests. They’d had their fill of it, spitting like angry cats in alley ways, and now, even in this stillness it lingered, eating, consuming like locusts swarming a field ripe with harvest. It was like trying to listen to snow falling, where there is nothing but the dampening of all small sounds. “Nonna wants us to FaceTime her on Sunday. Can you make that happen?”
There's a click against the wood of the table as Marcus turns his wrist and flips through the packet. He signs his name in the permanence of ink right on the dotted line. With the drop of the pen, it was official: he was an unmarried man, as if it never happened in the first place, memories erased with the spill of ink. He slides the document across the table and stares at her expectantly. "I can't this Sunday," he says. "I have a date." A date with a girl he actually likes, one he was sure his mother would have approved of too, had it not been for the camera roll filled with photos of the pair that sat at the round wooden table.
More at ease now with the signing of the paper over, Marcus lifts the drink up to his lips. He had ordered his coffee black mostly to avoid more questions from the waitress, and the bitter taste feels appropriate now. "Let's do it Saturday," he suggests. "Or tell her I have to work a double. She'll understand," he says. Despite how he felt about Len, he harbored no animosity towards her family. They were good people, kind people, and while they had forced the wrong two people together, their hearts were in the right place. He reminds himself of that when he looks at Len. “Is that a problem?”
