After Love Turned to Ashes, I Chose Myself

As I set the phone down on the counter, he came out of the bathroom, sleeves rolled to the forearm, water still on his hands. His gaze moved past me to the untouched bag on the table, and his brow creased.

He asked, "Didn't you say you hadn't eaten dinner?"

I raised my hand, showing him the stitches, the ugly black thread knotted into the swollen skin of my forearm where the dog's teeth had torn through. "The doctor said I need to avoid certain foods."

The food he brought back was either shrimp or heavily spiced. I knew without looking. That was Adriana Bellini's taste, not mine. Six years and he had never once learned what I could eat. Or perhaps he had known once, in the beginning, and simply stopped caring long before I stopped pretending it didn't matter.

His displeasure turned into something that sat unevenly on his face, a flicker of embarrassment he smothered before it could settle.

I had told him about being bitten by the dog. I had told him on the phone, my voice still shaking, while the clinic nurse cleaned gravel out of my knee. He hadn't taken it to heart. He had said, "Get it looked at," and ended the call because Adriana was waiting in the passenger seat.

He said, "Then order something else for yourself."

I nodded and took out my phone to start ordering. My thumb moved across the screen with a steadiness that surprised me. I selected a plain soup, white rice, steamed greens. The kind of meal a woman eats when she is recovering from a procedure she cannot name aloud in a house that belongs to a man who does not know she was pregnant this morning.

Seeing me not making a fuss, he looked puzzled, and his steps toward the bedroom paused. He stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame, watching me the way a man watches a lock that has always turned easily and suddenly resists the key.

He asked, "Is your next shot in three days? Do you need me to go with you?"

I replied, "No need."

I continued scrolling through the delivery menu with an expression I had practiced in the clinic bathroom mirror, the expression of a woman who has simply stopped.

Just as Dominic sensed my strangeness, I also felt his unusual behavior. He had never once offered to accompany me anywhere that did not serve his reputation. In the past, when I was injured, I would have to beg him to drive me to the clinic or to let one of his soldiers take me. If he agreed, I would be overjoyed for days, pathetically grateful for a crumb of acknowledgment from a man whose empire I had built with my own hands.

But today he offered on his own, and not only did I decline, but I also showed no sign of happiness. The gratitude was gone. It had bled out of me on a clinic table alongside everything else.

Dominic did not know that this afternoon, when I was being chased by that rabid dog along the gravel road behind the compound, I had just left the pharmacy on Prince Street where a test confirmed I was a month pregnant. His child. The only thing I had ever wanted from him that his money and territory could not buy.

When his car passed by, I had only been knocked down and hadn't been bitten yet. If he had gotten out of the car then, if he had so much as told his driver to stop, maybe our child could have been saved.

But there were no ifs. Not in this world. Not in a Family where loyalty ran only one direction.

After he left, I was bitten three times by the rabid dog. The most serious wound needed a circle of stitches because a piece of flesh there was almost torn off. The clinic doctor, a man who asked no questions because he was paid by the Falcone Family not to, had looked at my bloodwork results and then at my face, and I had told him what to do, and he had done it, and that was the end.

"Suit yourself," Dominic said.

Rejected by me for the first time in six years, he was not happy. I could see it in the stillness of his jaw, the way his weight shifted, the fractional pause before he turned away. He was not accustomed to hearing "no" from me. I had been the one constant in his life that never refused, never demanded, never made him feel the cost of his own cruelty. That woman had died this afternoon on a gravel road while his sedan disappeared around the corner.

But as soon as he turned, his phone buzzed in his trouser pocket, and he drew it out with the ease of a man reaching for a glass of wine. I saw the screen illuminate his face. I did not need to read the name. I already knew, the way you know the sound of a door that has been opening behind your back for months.

Seeing the name on the phone, he stopped frowning. The tension left his shoulders. His mouth softened into something I had never been offered, a kind of warmth that existed only in the frequency of another woman's name.

"Since you're injured, I'll sleep in the guest room tonight," he said, already half-turned away, already gone.

I had no objection to this. I had no objection to anything anymore. Objection required hope, and hope required something left inside the chest to break, and I had used the last of mine on a scream he had chosen not to hear.

But as I passed by the guest room door on my way back to my room, walking slowly because the stitches pulled and the cramping had not fully stopped, I heard low laughter coming from inside. His voice through the heavy oak, muffled but unmistakable, carrying the particular softness of a man speaking to someone he wants.

"Okay, this is on me. I'll make it up to you tomorrow."

Dominic's tone was gentle and affectionate, a treatment I had never experienced. Not once. Not on the night I handed him the offshore account structure that saved the Falcone territory from a federal seizure. Not when I sat beside him at inter-family dinners and smiled at men who would have killed me if they knew how much I understood about their finances. Not even in the early days, when I had believed that if I just loved him precisely enough, he would learn to love me back.

In my memory, the only smile Dominic Falcone ever gave me was a mocking one when he was angry, a cold curl of the lip that made his signet ring flash under the light as his hand tightened on whatever he was holding. Other than that, he was always indifferent toward me, the way a man is indifferent toward the foundation beneath his house. Essential, invisible, never thanked.

I stood in the hallway for a long time. The light under the guest room door was warm and gold. My reflection in the dark window at the end of the corridor was a shape I barely recognized, thin and bandaged and very still.

It didn't matter now. I didn't care anymore.

I said those words to myself as I walked the remaining steps to the bedroom, and I pressed my thumb once more to the inside of my wrist, and my pulse answered, steady and alive, and I closed the door behind me without making a sound.