Nina Pennacchi

But there is always the little matter of private insults and those made in public. Isn’t that so, Anna?

“Anna, I have known I loved you for many months. I’ve been a coward to have not come forward before, and I hope you can forgive me. Am I a fool to think my feelings may be reciprocated? The truth is that . . .” He stopped, embarrassed, and his smile became that of a little boy, upset but adorable. “The truth is that since the first time we danced together—even before you trampled on my foot for the tenth time—I fell in love with you.”

“Deny, always deny, Anthony,” Christopher had told him a few days before.

“Even when there’s no possibility whatsoever of being believed, Christopher?” the boy had asked.

“Especially then. You have nothing to lose, right?”

We aren’t playing anymore, are we, my dear?

A man sentenced to hang, standing on the gallows while the hood is put over his head, would have the same expression in his eyes as Anna had then—wide open and ready to glimpse the last moment of light. His wife had hidden behind her words of defiance an uncontrollable, primal emotion—the one that makes the baby cry in the cradle, because, even before knowing what life is, it already fears death.

“Oh, Anna, dear,” he murmured. “But you are frightened.”

Could she? Could she accept to be touched by such a heinous man, willing to threaten her family—a family that loved him and welcomed him every night like a son? Could she please a man who routinely crushed the weak and innocent, as Daniel had revealed? Could she satisfy a man who on a July afternoon had thrown her in the grass, violating her dreams, raping her memories? With his mouth on her cheek and his burning heat against her, she wondered, Can I do it?

“I swear to God, Anna. Let me hug you and kiss you only for a few minutes . . . just a few minutes . . . You can’t imagine how much I need it.”

no scandal is worse than a life spent with a violent man.