Page 21 of Broken Trust

Iignore Mia's message. I put my phone face down on the kitchen counter, finish washing Rosa's bottles, and go to bed telling myself I'll deal with it in the morning. I don't sleep much. Rosa wakes at two and again at four, and every time I get up to feed her, I think about those five words and my stomach knots up.

At eight the phone rings. I grab it, expecting Mia, ready to tell her where she can shove her demands.

Fuck! It's my suocera.

“Dante.” Her voice is crisp, like she's calling one of her maids. “I'm at Mia's. Come over this morning. We need to talk about what happens next.”

“I'm raising my daughter.”

“Ten o'clock,” she says, and hangs up.

I stand there in the kitchen staring at the phone. Part of me wants to throw it at the wall. The other part knows that if I don't go, they'll come to me, and I don't want either of them anywhere near this house. So I pack the diaper bag, strap Rosa into her car seat, and drive across the river.

I think about leaving her with Nella, but Nella's on shift, and to be honest I want Mia to see her. Some stupid part of me still hopes that when Mia looks at her own baby, something in her will wake up. It happened to me in that delivery room. Maybe it can happen to her.

Mia's building looks worse in daylight, with peeling paint on the stairwell and a bike chained to the railing with no front wheel. I climb up with Rosa in the carrier against my chest. She's awake, looking around with those big dark eyes, her little fist hanging on to the strap.

My suocera opens the door before I knock. She's in a cream cashmere sweater and pearls, her lipstick perfect, her hair done like she's on her way to lunch at the club. She looks at me, then at the carrier, and her mouth tightens.

“You brought the baby.”

“Her name's Rosa.”

“I know what her name is, Dante.” She steps aside. “Come in. And don't upset Mia. She's been through a lot.”

The apartment smells of nail polish and old coffee. Mia is lying on the couch in silk pajamas, flipping through a magazine, with a bowl of cherries on her stomach. Her stomach's almost flat again, like the last eight months never happened. The vitamins are gone from the counter. The scan photos are no longer on the fridge. If I didn't know better, I'd never guess she’d been pregnant.

She looks up at me and smiles. Then her eyes flick to Rosa and slide straight off her, like she's looking at a coat I've carried in.

“Hi, Dante,” Mia says.

“Mia.”

I stand there looking at her, and for the first time I really see it. She has Gia's face. Same eyes, same mouth, same dimple on the left when she smiles. For a year I told myself that was what pulled me in. But the face is all they share. If this were Gia, she'd already be on her knees in front of the carrier, cooing and crying and kissing Rosa's fingers. Mia hasn't even put down the cherries.

She's beautiful. And she's ugly as hell on the inside. How did I not see it before?

“Sit down,” my suocera says, taking the armchair by the window. She crosses her legs and folds her hands in her lap. “We have things to discuss.”

“I'll stand.”

Rosa squirms, and I rub her back until she settles.

“Fine. Stand.” She looks up at me. “You violated my daughter, Dante.”

I almost laugh. “I what?”

“You heard me. Mia offered to carry a child for her sister out of the goodness of her heart, and you took advantage of her. You were her brother-in-law. She trusted you. And you got her pregnant in the most disgusting way imaginable, and then you let the entire family find out at her baby shower.” Her voice goes cold. “Do you have any idea what you've done to her? What decent man is going to want her now? You've ruined her life. So now you're going to pay for it.”

I look over at Mia and wait for her to say something. Anything. That she was the one who called me at midnight. That she kept telling me Gia didn't love me. That she wanted this long before I was stupid enough to go along with it.

Mia eats a cherry and turns a page.

“That's not what happened,” I snap. “And you know it.”

“It doesn't matter what happened. What matters is how it looks.” She shrugs. “And it looks like a married man with nothing to his name got his wife's twin sister pregnant. I can make things very difficult for you in this city.”

“You already have.”