Replaced by His Mistress

Four in the morning, and the only sound in my apartment was the hum of the printer.

I watched the pages feed through one by one, the lamp casting a small yellow circle on my desk. *Graduate Research Liability Form.* That was what the top of the stack said. Clean university letterhead, the school crest centered and official-looking. I'd spent three days getting the formatting exactly right.

Page five was the one that mattered.

I stacked the papers, tapped them against the desk to align the edges, and slid them into a manila folder. My hands were steady. That surprised me, the first time. It didn't anymore.

---

Aldo's office was on the fourteenth floor of a building that smelled like old carpet and burnt coffee. Nothing like the glass towers downtown where Dante's lawyers worked. That was the point.

He was already reading when I came in, his glasses low on his nose, the folder open across his desk. He turned each page slowly, the way a man does when he's looking for the thing that will get someone killed.

I sat across from him and waited.

He closed the folder.

"The overlay is clean," he said. "If he signs without pulling the pages apart, he'll never see it." He took his glasses off and set them on the desk. "But Elena."

"I know."

"If he finds out before the twenty-one days of finalization—" He stopped. Started again. "He can break this. He can break *you*."

The radiator in the corner ticked. Outside, a cab horn blared and faded.

"He won't read it," I said. "He has never read anything I put in front of him."

Aldo looked at me for a long moment. He'd known my father for thirty years. He'd been at my parents' wedding, at my father's funeral, at my own wedding four years ago, standing in the back of the church with an expression I hadn't understood then. I understood it now.

"Your father would hate this," he said quietly.

"My father would hate a lot of things about the last four years."

He didn't argue with that. He picked up his pen and initialed the notary line at the bottom of the real document—the one buried on page five. His hand moved without hesitation. That was the thing about Aldo. He was seventy-one years old, three months from retirement, and he had watched my father take a bullet meant for him in 1987. He was the only attorney in this city who didn't flinch at the name Ferraro.

He slid the folder back across the desk.

"Twenty-one days," he said. "Don't give him a reason to look twice at you."

I picked up the folder. "I never have."

---

The Zurich Institute's interview room was a converted storage closet at the back of the university's graduate center—the only space on campus with a door that locked and a decent internet connection. I'd reserved it for two hours.

I opened my laptop, smoothed my blazer, and clicked *Join Meeting.*

Dr. Isabel Reyes appeared on screen. She was in her fifties, silver-haired, with the kind of direct gaze that didn't waste time on pleasantries. Behind her, through a tall window, I could see the pale gray of a Swiss afternoon.

We went through the research proposal first. I talked about soil contamination mapping, about the fieldwork I'd done before the gap, about the methodology I'd been quietly refining for the past two years in whatever hours I could carve out. My voice was even. Precise. This was the version of me that existed before the Ferraro estate, before the dining room silences, before the shoe box in the closet.

Then Dr. Reyes leaned forward slightly.

"Dr. Vance," she said. "You've had a four-year gap in publications. What happened?"

The cursor blinked on my screen.

I thought about the pasta I'd made on my anniversary. The candles I'd blown out alone. The way Dante's fingers had grazed the back of my neck last night like I was furniture he'd brushed past.

"I got married," I said. "I'm correcting that."

Something shifted in her expression. Not pity. Something closer to recognition.

We finished the interview. She walked me through the fellowship terms, the housing, the start date.

Then, just before she reached for her laptop, she paused.

"Fellowship starts October first. Family housing is reserved." Her eyes held mine through the screen. "One last thing—the institute doesn't tolerate interference from outside parties. Whatever you're leaving behind, leave it behind."

"Understood," I said.

The screen went dark.

I sat in the quiet of the locked room for a moment. Then I looked down, my hand drifting to rest against my stomach.

"Just you and me now," I whispered.

The folder with Aldo's initials sat on the desk beside my laptop.

Twenty-one days.