The Night I Took Our Daughter Away

Three days after Mia came home, Luca asked for the lake house.

It was the first place we bought after our courthouse wedding, back when the Moretti name still felt like a family instead of a fortress. No guards, no cameras, just wide windows facing Lake Michigan and cheap shelves we built ourselves on the living-room floor. Luca had once burned his hand making coffee there and laughed until I kissed it better.

"Vivienne is afraid of the main house now," he said over breakfast. "The guards, the patrol cars, the noise. It all takes her back to that night. Nico needs somewhere quieter too. The lake house would be better for them."

He paused, braced for a fight. "If you're attached to it, I can arrange something else."

"They can have it," I said, closing Mia's medicine case.

Luca looked up, surprised. "Elena, that is generous of you."

He mistook my silence for peace. He often did. To him, no argument meant forgiveness. He never understood that I had stopped fighting because there was nothing left I wanted badly enough to beg for.

That afternoon, movers came for the keys. I was cutting dead roses in the garden when Vivienne stepped behind me.

"You're more practical than I expected," she said.

Without Luca nearby, her voice lost its helpless tremble. Her lipstick was brighter too, her eyes clearer.

I did not look up. "I don't know what you mean."

"First the house, then the divorce papers." She laughed softly. "Once everything is final, you and Mia will finally be out of the way."

The shears paused in my hand.

Vivienne smiled. "Don't look so shocked. Luca never reads documents when I'm calling him. You know that better than anyone."

"Dante has been dead for three years," I said.

"Exactly." She brushed her thumb over her wedding ring. "A dead man is perfect. He never comes home, and Luca will spend his life paying a debt he can never settle. Sometimes the nightmares are real. Sometimes they're just useful."

So I had not imagined it. She had turned Luca's guilt into a leash, and he had handed her the end of it himself.

That evening, Luca came home with a wedding binder.

"We only had a courthouse signing," he said, sitting beside me. "You once wanted vows, white roses, music, the whole thing. Elena, I owe you a real wedding."

I flipped through the pages: candles, a string quartet, flowers over the private chapel, fireworks over the lake. At twenty-three, I would have cried. At thirty, I knew the difference between being chosen and being compensated.

"It isn't necessary anymore," I said.

"It is." He covered my hand with his. "Let me give you this much. Let me fix at least one thing."

For a second, I saw the boy I had loved beneath the boss he had become. Then his phone lit up with Vivienne's name, and his fingers tightened around mine as if he already knew he would answer if she called again.

I looked at him, then nodded.

He thought I had agreed to a wedding.

I had agreed to a clean ending.