Eight Graves Later, I Stopped Loving Him

Every smile, every frown, every glance and every fleeting gesture. Lorenzo's lens had captured Carmela's every movement, frame after frame, like a man cataloging something sacred.

After the day we were bound together in the alliance union, Lorenzo had never picked up that camera again.

Once, I asked him to take a portrait of me carrying his child. He told me, simply, that the camera was lost, and arranged for one of the Family's photographers to do the work instead.

The truth was he hadn't lost anything. His lens was reserved for one woman alone, and I had never been her.

I slid the album back into its hiding place, my eyes completely dried up. I had no more tears to waste on him.

On my phone I booked a seat on a flight bound for neutral territory, somewhere far beyond the Commission's long reach. Then I drafted the papers of severance from the Family. If he wanted Carmela that badly, let him have her.

The next morning my eyes were so swollen they looked like walnuts.

Lorenzo noticed, and something in him seemed to soften into worry. Unlike any other day, he made breakfast himself, in a kitchen that smelled faintly of garlic from last night's Sunday meal. He boiled an egg and peeled it with careful hands, then pressed it gently against my swollen eyes to bring down the swelling.

His tenderness was so convincing that for a moment I almost believed last night had been nothing more than a bad dream.

But the hollow ache in my belly held me firmly to the truth.

Lorenzo sighed when he saw I hadn't touched a single spoonful of the porridge he'd made.

"Adriana, we just lost our baby. I know you're heartbroken, and I'm hurting too, but you have to take care of yourself. After everything your body's been through, you can't keep going like this. Please eat something, for my sake. Don't make me worry, all right?"

"Where is my baby's body? I want to see him."

Three months. By then my child would have already taken shape. I would never hold him. I would never even see his face.

Lorenzo's answer was the same as it had been the seven times before. "I made certain the baby was properly buried. You're too distraught right now, cara. I won't have you breaking your heart further over a grave."

"My parents are grieving too. Come to the family estate tonight for dinner. It'll do all of us good to be together."

The moment I stepped through the iron gates of the Marchetti estate, I saw Carmela draped on Matteo's arm, every gesture of hers dripping with playful flirtation.

When she noticed me, she tilted her head and pushed her belly forward with a slow, deliberate pride, as if displaying a trophy.

"Oh, Adriana! It's been ages. Come, sit. I heard you lost another little one. You really must be careful not to overexert that fragile body of yours."

Ever since the wedding, things had sat tense and cold between me and the two of them. Whenever I came to the estate, I arranged my visits for the hours I knew they'd be elsewhere.

Today the luck wasn't with me.

I looked at Carmela's six-month belly and felt a sharp pang in my chest. She carried Lorenzo's child. And that man had never once let a pregnancy of mine survive past three months.

When Donna, Lorenzo's mother, saw me, her face curdled.

"Useless. You can't even keep a child alive in your own womb. How many times now? And still you have the nerve to look tired? How my son ended up bound to a woman like you, God only knows."

Donna was Lorenzo's blood mother and Matteo's stepmother both. At fifty, she had watched the rule of the Family that should have passed to her own son slip instead into Matteo's hands. The wound of it had never closed.

Once, Lorenzo would have stood between his mother and me. Now his eyes rested only on Carmela, full of longing and devotion, blind to the tension drawn tight as wire across the room.

"Donna, please don't trouble yourself," Carmela said sweetly, her voice thick with false concern. "It's only that Adriana wasn't blessed with the fortune to be a mother. After losing so many, it isn't as though she wished it on herself."

Donna scoffed, her fingers rising to roll the crucifix at her throat between them. "She is a cursed woman. Nothing more. Dragging my son down with her into ruin."

Pretending to make peace, Carmela moved to guide me toward a chair. As she rose, she let herself stumble.

She caught her balance at once, but Lorenzo didn't wait to see it. He shoved me aside and crossed the room to her.

Ignoring every other soul in the place, he pulled Carmela into his arms and asked, low and anxious, "Carmela, are you all right? You're carrying. Why are you on your feet alone? Where is Matteo?"

Carmela gave a honeyed smile. "Matteo's away on Family business across the water. He's about to take his seat as underboss, so the work's been swallowing him whole."

She cut me a mocking glance before she turned back to Lorenzo, arranging her face into an expression so painfully, cloyingly sweet it set my teeth on edge.