The hospital smelled like metal and lemon. Monitors blinked soft green beside Papa’s bed, his heartbeat sketching a careful line across the screen. The cardiologist said stabile and something unclenched in my ribs. Sofia squeezed my hand under the railing, a steady pulse I could borrow.
“We leave him to rest,” she murmured near my ear. “They’ll watch him. Now we go to the station.”
“Now?” My voice came out paper-thin.
“Now,” she said, like a door opening. “Capitano Carla Bianchi is waiting.” An she guided me to her car.
Capitano Bianchi’s office was cool and square and very official. File cabinets lined up like soldiers. A glass of water stood exactly in the middle of the desk. I sat across from it and tried not to fold into origami.
Sofia kept my fingers captive under the table—warm, firm. “Ready,” she whispered, and I nodded even though my stomach disagreed.
Carla Bianchi had tidy hair and questions that didn’t blink. Not cruel—just clinical, like a surgeon washing her hands. She let me speak first. Rome, Tuscany, the tutoring, the dress, the attic, the threats. My voice shook, then steadied, then shook again. She didn’t interrupt. When I finished, she began.
“Messages?” she asked. I unlocked my phone. Sofia slid over the organized screenshots Luisa had batched. Dates, times, the Midnight text, the call logs.
“Emails?” I showed the invitation to the clinic. Program Director: L.F.
“Witnesses?” We named names. Nurses, residents, patients who’d thanked him with tears still on their faces.
Then the questions sharpened.
“Did you ever initiate physical contact?” Carla asked, pen poised.
“No.” I hated how small the word sounded. “I… sometimes I didn’t stop him fast enough. I froze.”
“Did you intend to… seduce him?” Her eyes stayed calm. Mine flared.
“I’m nineteen,” I said, too loud, then softer. “I wanted to be seen. You know.. As a woman. I wanted attention. I—”
Carla wrote, flipped a page. “During the assaults—did he use protection?”
The room went blurry around the edges. “I—” My tongue felt wrong in my mouth. I tried to rewind my own body. “No,” I said finally, because memory can be cruelly clear. “No, he didn’t.”
“When was your last menstruation?” she asked, as if she were asking the weather.
I stared at her. Sofia’s hand tightened on mine. Numbers scrambled in my head like marbles. Tuscany. The party. The emerald dress. The weeks after—no sleep, no food, no… oh.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. The floor tilted. “I—maybe… I don’t know.”
Carla’s pen stopped. She looked at me without shields. “We’ll arrange medical care,” she said, voice lower, warmer. “And I will do everything within the law. But I must ask you to think about something, signorina. If you are pregnant, will you want to acknowledge him as the father? It changes procedure. It changes the fight.”
Something inside me cracked the way glass does—clean, with a sound you feel more than hear.
She paused. “May I speak with Signora Sofia alone?”
I stepped into the corridor. The station smelled like paper and old coffee. An officer passed with a stack of forms and the soft scuff of duty shoes. I pressed my palms to my eyes until stars bloomed.
Sofia emerged minutes later, expression composed, eyes bright. “Andiamo,” she said, guiding me out like I was learning to walk. “We’ll stop at the pharmacy.”
The pharmacist didn’t ask. Just pushed a small white box across the counter with a look I recognized: pity built like armor. On the way home, Sofia drove with both hands at ten and two, wrists steady. “You are not alone,” she said, as if she were pinning the words to my shirt. “Whatever the test says, whichever path you choose—you are not alone.”
At the villa she pressed the box into my hands and kissed my temple. “Rest first,” she said. “Breathe. The choice is yours.”
I went to my room, the test sat on my nightstand like a little white bomb. I stared at it until the edges of the box imprinted on my eyes. My heartbeat counted seconds: one, two, don’t, please, stop.
Knock.
“Can I come in?” Matteo’s voice, careful at the threshold.
“Come,” I said, and the syllable steadied me.
He closed the broken door as if it still worked. Saw the box. Saw my face. His jaw tightened once, then loosened. “What happened at the station?”
So I told him. Carla’s questions like scalpels. The possibility like a trapdoor I hadn’t seen. His eyes didn’t leave mine. When I reached protection, the muscle in his cheek jumped. He crossed the room in three strides and pulled me into his chest, arms firm. My bones remembered how to stack.
“I’m here,” he said against my hair. “Whatever happens.”
He eased back and held out his hand. “May I?”
I put the box in his palm. He turned it over like it was fragile, which it was. He didn’t force it into my hands or push me toward the bathroom or say now. He just set it gently on the dresser and looked at me.
“Do it when you’re ready,” he said. “Or not. I’m not going anywhere.”
He didn’t step back. The air between us felt clean, like after a storm. I lifted my chin and actually looked at him—at the patience in his mouth, the steadiness in his shoulders, the way his gaze never wandered from my face.
“Matteo,” I said, surprised by my own voice, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
His eyes widened, a crack of light. “You… what?”
“I think I have been,” I said, laughter and tears tangling. “For a while. I just couldn’t see through the smoke.”
He cupped my face with both hands, his thumbs feather-soft at my jaw, and didn’t move closer until I nodded. “Can I kiss you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I breathed.
It was gentle. Careful like prayer. Nothing like the hungry taking I’d learned to fear—this was giving and asking at the same time. My knees didn’t go weak; they steadied. My heart didn’t race; it found a rhythm that felt like mine.
When we pulled apart, both of us a little breathless, he rested his forehead against mine. “After tonight,” he whispered, a smile in the words, “when you’re free and your father’s safe and we’ve chosen the next steps—I want to do this right. I want to court you. Take you out. Tell you stupid jokes in bad restaurants. Walk you home.”
I grinned, shocked to find that the feeling still existed in me. “I want that too.”
The sound of tires on gravel cut through the moment. We both turned toward the window.
“Luisa,” I said, feeling the shape of her name like armor.
“Let’s go,” Matteo said, voice calm again.
We went downstairs together. Sofia was already in the hall, hair tied back, sleeves rolled. Luisa burst in with her notebook and a look that could slice wire.
Sofia didn’t waste a second. “Living room,” she said, her voice all plan and backbone. “We need to talk strategy.”
We followed. The door—broken and brave—swung wide.