Choose Me, Please

If this were ordinary drama, maybe I would have stood up, rolled my eyes, and told them all to get a hobby. But there was something in the way the entire room held its breath that made my spine go rigid.

Vittoria pulled out the first photo and set it on the low table between us.

I recognized it before I really had the chance to look.

An underground parking garage. Bad lighting. The angle was too far away, too grainy. I was standing there with one shoe off, my body tilted slightly because my heel had snapped. Marco, one of the external project managers who had worked with my studio a few times, had a hand on my waist to keep me from falling.

If someone wanted badly enough to believe I was cheating, well, be my guest. Imagination was free.

I blinked once.

Then twice.

The second photo.

A printed hotel keycard log under my design studio’s name.

The Mandarin Oriental, two months ago.

I remembered it. My assistant had booked the suite under the studio because a client from Los Angeles refused to look at stone samples in the showroom and wanted everything brought to the hotel instead. I’d even arrived late because of traffic. But on paper, the small details looked deliberately dirtied.

Name. Time. Room number.

The third photo was a screenshot of a chat.

Fragments of messages. Incomplete. Brutally cropped. Just enough to sound disgusting.

[Last night was a mistake.]

[No one can know.]

[R won’t understand.]

The blood in my ears went loud all at once.

I knew that chat. Of course I knew it. It was a message to Lila, my assistant, after the client presentation had gone sideways because a vendor sent the wrong samples and I lost it in the hotel hallway.

‘Last night was a mistake’ referred to the decision to have the whole team stay at the hotel to meet the deadline.

‘No one can know’ because the client wanted everything kept strictly confidential before the merger was announced.

And ‘R won’t understand’ was not Rafael. It was Riccardo, the client’s CFO, temperamental and allergic to data leaks.

But with everything else cut out, the chat looked like the confession of a stupid woman too lazy to lie properly.

I stared at the papers. Then at Vittoria. Then at the rest of the room.

Then I let out a small, humorless laugh and barely stopped myself from throwing one of this family’s antique vases at the wall.

“Seriously?” I kept my voice soft. “This?”

No one laughed with me.

Vittoria folded her hands over the top of her cane. “Are you going to say that isn’t you?”

“That’s me,” I said. “With a broken shoe and a bad day. A true national scandal.”

“Sasha,” Rafael said quietly.

I turned to him, ready to find sanity.

And that was when the world began to shift.

He wasn’t touching me anymore.

His hand wasn’t at my waist. Not on my thigh. Not at my back. He was sitting slightly farther away now, such a small distance maybe no one else would have noticed. But I felt it like a door opening into winter.

His face was blank.

Too blank.

His blue eyes dropped to the photos on the table, then came back to my face. There was no small softening, no flicker that said this is insane, no hidden touch telling me ignore them, I’m here.

Just silence.

My chest tightened. “You cannot be serious.”

No answer.

I looked at him harder, waiting for something to move in his face. A crease. Denial. Anger aimed at his family. Anything.

Nothing.

What made everything start to collapse wasn’t the cheap evidence on the table. Not the blurry photo or the ridiculous cropped texts. It was the way my husband looked at me like I had suddenly become a disgusting math problem that, unfortunately, made sense.

“I always said women like you bring certain habits into decent families,” Vittoria said again, her soft voice as sharp as paper slicing skin.

I turned to her. “Women like you?”

Her gaze moved from the tip of my shoe to the top of my head, slow and exacting. “The kind who arrive with a pretty face and empty hands, then imagine beauty can take the place of a family name.”

My smile widened. “If I’d known marrying into this family required an eighteenth-century moral audit, maybe I would’ve brought a lawyer.”

One of Rafael’s uncles let out an angry hiss.

Vittoria didn’t even blink. “Still bold.”

“Because this is insulting,” I said, my smile fading. “And stupid.” I pointed to the first photo. “Marco was holding me up because my heel broke. If you’d like, I still have the shoe. Maybe we can frame it, make my affair evidence feel more dramatic.”

No reaction.

I pointed at the keycard log. “That suite was used for a client meeting. My assistant booked it. You can verify that.” Then the screenshot of the chat. “And that was cropped. Deliberately.”

“Enough,” Vittoria cut in.

“Not yet.” I leaned forward, my voice sharpening. “If someone’s going to accuse me of cheating, they could at least have the decency to bring evidence that doesn’t look like it was assembled by the brain of someone who watches too much daytime television.”

Rafael’s female cousin lowered her head quickly, hiding something that looked a lot like surprise. One of his aunts let out a quiet breath. Alessandro was watching me carefully now, like he’d just realized I might bite.

Good.

I turned to Rafael. “Say something.”

He stayed silent.

My heart was pounding in the wrong place. I forced out a small laugh. “Rafael.”

He looked at me like he was trying to read a language that had suddenly gone foreign.

“Say something.”

“Who is he?” he asked at last. Just that.

It felt like someone had just slapped me, softly, with a silk glove. “Excuse me?”

“The man.” His gaze shifted to the parking garage photo, then back to me. “Who is he?”

“A project manager.”

“One who’s worked with you several times.”

I stared at him. “Yes. Because he works. With. Me.”

Rafael’s jaw tightened. Slightly. Very slightly. But I saw it.

“I can explain everything,” I said, and I instantly hated the way it sounded. Cheap. Defensive. Like there really was something to explain.

“If there’s nothing there,” Elisabetta said carefully, “then it shouldn’t be difficult to explain.”

I let out a short, sharp laugh. “Incredible. So now the burden of proof is on me, after your mother-in-law put together a scrapbook out of garbage?”

“Sasha.” Rafael’s voice dropped, low and cold.

I turned to him very slowly.

“Don’t speak to my mother like that.”

I looked at him for a few seconds. Really looked at him, searching for my husband in that face.

What I saw was Rafael Moretti. Heir. Son. Family name. The cold machine who had always been able to separate emotion from decision when the moment demanded it.

And suddenly I realized something that turned my skin to ice.

They had already talked before I walked into this room.

I didn’t know when. I didn’t know for how long. But Rafael was not hearing this with me for the first time.

He had already sat with it. Already weighed it. Already let that filthy little seed grow large enough that now he could look at me like this.

“Wow,” I said quietly.

Rafael didn’t react.

I looked around the room. Beautiful faces. Old faces. Disciplined faces. Rich faces. All of them waiting for me to fall apart in a way that stayed tidy and didn’t disturb the furniture. This house would probably still smell like amber candles even if I bled out on the carpet.

My palm moved downward on instinct, almost touching my stomach.

The baby.

I stopped myself.

No.

Not now.

Not one person in this room was going to touch that news tonight. Not with their dirty hands. Not with the way they were looking at me now.

Vittoria broke the silence. “You’re lucky my grandson is too patient. Another man might have thrown you out tonight.”

I turned to her slowly. “I’d be deeply moved if your opinion meant anything to me.”

Alessandro set his glass down a little too hard. “Sasha.”

I stood.

Rafael stood a few seconds later.

Much slower. Taller. Colder.

I looked at him, waiting for him to come to me. Waiting for him to pull me out of this insane room. Waiting for a hand at my elbow, my waist, my back, anything that said we were still on the same side.

He didn’t move.

My eyes started to burn, and that made me angry. I didn’t cry often. I preferred making other people uncomfortable.

“I didn’t cheat,” I said to him, each word feeling like glass. “I don’t even know why I’m standing here saying that in front of these people.”

Rafael looked at me for a long time. His blue eyes, which usually felt like a winter I could survive inside, now looked like frozen glass.

“I can prove everything.”

“Can you?” Vittoria asked sweetly.

I didn’t look at her.

My eyes stayed on Rafael. On the man who had kissed my cheek at the dinner table a few minutes ago. Whose hand had been on my thigh. The man I was going to tell he was going to be a father the second we got home.

Now he stood in front of me like a stranger who just happened to be wearing my husband’s face.

I wanted him to choose me. It was that simple. Annoyingly simple, because I hated when one of my needs could be reduced to something so small and humiliating.

Choose me.

But families like the Morettis were raised to choose blood, name, and legacy first. Love came after, if there was room for it.

Rafael took one step forward.

“Are you really going to keep lying,” he said, looking at me like I was something filthy stuck to the sole of his shoe, “even now?”