Chapter 2 — Twenty-Two Years of Being Spoiled
1026 Words
Three days before the church.
Valentina Conti woke at ten-fifteen on a Tuesday morning because she wanted to, not because anyone made her.
This was important. she had always believed, a fundamental human right — the right to wake when your body decided it was finished sleeping, rather than when an alarm or an obligation or someone else's schedule demanded it. Her father's money had purchased this right for her, along with a six-room apartment in the Brera district, a closet that required its own organizational system, and the comfortable certainty that the world would arrange itself around her preferences rather than the reverse.
She lay in bed for twenty additional minutes, watching morning light move across her ceiling, thinking about nothing in particular.
Then she got up, made espresso and called her sister.
"He texted again," she announced, before Sofia could say hello.
Sofia, twenty-seven and sensible in ways Valentina found faintly irritating, said, "Good morning to you too."
"It's morning, it's good, he texted again."
Valentina carried her espresso to the floor-to-ceiling window and looked out at the terracotta rooftops of Brera. "Three times. With punctuation. A man who texts with correct punctuation at nine in the morning is either deeply boring or secretly insane, and I can't decide which is worse."
"His name is Giuseppe—"
"I know his name, Sofia."
"—and he is a perfectly nice accountant who took you to dinner twice and clearly likes you."
"He described his pasta as 'life-changing.'" She drank her espresso. "It was rigatoni."
There was a pause on Sofia's end that Valentina recognized as the pause of someone choosing not to say several things. "Not everything has to be dramatic," Sofia said finally.
"I'm not asking for dramatic. I'm asking for interesting." Valentina turned from the window. Her apartment arranged itself around her in the way she liked: beautiful, curated, entirely hers. Cream walls and dark wood floors and a bookshelf full of novels she'd actually read.
This was her life. She had designed it carefully out of the materials her father's money provided and her own particular taste, and she intended to keep it exactly like this until she decided to change it — which she would do when she wanted to, not before.
She was twenty-two years old. She was the youngest of three. She was, by most objective measures, spoiled — she knew this, acknowledged it with the breezy comfort of someone who has never needed to examine it closely. Her brother Rafael called her a brat with affection. Her sister called her exhausting with affection. Her father called her his treasure with something that had always felt, to Valentina, like the closest thing to uncomplicated love she'd ever received from him.
Her mother had died when she was seven. She remembered Federica Conti in fragments — a particular perfume, a lullaby half-recalled, the feeling of small hands held in warm ones. After that it had been Enzo and his money and his erratic affections, swinging between lavish generosity and distracted absence. The money was always consistent, though.
Valentina had learned early that love was complicated and money was simple, and she had arranged her emotional life accordingly.
"Come to dinner Sunday," Sofia said. "Papa wants us all together."
"I have plans Sunday."
"What plans?"
"Future plans. Plans I'll make between now and Sunday that will be better than family dinner."
"Valentina—"
"Fine, I'll come." She would not come. She would text an excuse on Sunday morning claiming a headache or a gallery opening or something else entirely credible. This was the established rhythm of their family, the steps of a dance they'd all memorized and never discussed.
"How is Papa?" she asked.
A pause. Shorter than the first one, but different in quality. Something careful underneath it.
"He's fine," Sofia said. "You know how he is."
Valentina did know how he was. Enzo Conti, sixty-one, former textile industry magnate, currently — what, exactly? She'd noticed things over the past year. The apartment they'd grown up in on Via Montenapoleone, sold. The car collection, quietly reduced.
The annual trips to the south of France, stopped without explanation. When she asked, he smiled his charming smile and said business was restructuring. When she asked Rafael, he changed the subject.
She filed it away. Not with concern — Enzo had always landed on his feet. He was a Conti. They all landed on their feet. It was practically genetic.
"Tell him I'll come Sunday," she said, knowing she wouldn't.
"I will," Sofia said, knowing she wouldn't either.
They said goodbye. Valentina drank the rest of her espresso, she thought about whether to go to the market or order delivery for dinner, and decided delivery, and spent a pleasant half hour choosing between three nearly identical pasta dishes before selecting one at random.
She did not think about her father's finances.
She did not think about the car collection or the apartment or the trips.
She thought: my life is mine and it is good and nothing is about to change.
She was wrong about that last part in ways she couldn't yet imagine.
The knock at her door came at four in the afternoon. Not a call, not a text — her father standing in her doorway in a suit that needed pressing, holding his hat in both hands the way men did in old films when they were about to deliver terrible news.
He looked old. She noticed it and immediately wanted to un-notice it.
"Can I come in, my treasure?" Enzo said.
She let him in. She made him espresso because it gave her hands something to do. She sat across from him at the kitchen table where she had eaten a thousand breakfasts alone, read a thousand books, built her small and perfect self-contained life.
And her father looked at his coffee cup and said, "I need to tell you something about a man named Luca Ferraro."
The cat on the rooftop opposite sat in the window all afternoon, judging her, as the world she had built so carefully began to come apart at the seams.
- Writer
