While He Protected Her, I Stopped Loving Him

"Carla, you could never disturb me. I live for the sound of your voice, you know that. You're the only good thing in my day." I heard him say it through the half-open door, his voice gone soft in a way it never went for me, as he drifted out of the bedroom with the phone pressed to his ear like something precious.

Carla was the only good thing in his day. And what was I? The lawful wife. The name on the marriage register. The woman whose bloodline had been welded to the Moretti Family in a sacred vow before God and every Don in the territory, and who now sat alone at a dining table built for two while her husband whispered devotions into a phone for another woman.

I pressed my left hand flat against my thigh, folding my bare ring finger inward against my palm, that old reflex, that phantom reach for the band I'd stopped sliding on each morning. There was nothing there to touch anymore. There hadn't been for a while.

My phone hummed against the marble, dragging me up out of the dark water of my own thoughts. A message. From Vito, one of Lorenzo's own capos, a made man who answered to my husband and yet, for reasons I had never asked, kept finding small ways to put truth in my hands.

[Look at what the Don posted tonight. You should see it.]

A link sat beneath the words. My thumb hovered over it for a long moment, the way you hover at the edge of something you already know will cut you. Then I tapped it.

A video bloomed across the screen. Lorenzo. My Lorenzo, the man who barely lifted his eyes to me across a room, leaning close to the camera with that lazy, indulgent warmth he reserved for her. "I'm sorry, Carla," he said, and even his voice in the recording was velvet. "I should never have told you to text me when you wanted to hear me on the phone. From now on, whatever you want, you'll have it. That's a promise from the man who'll always take care of you."

I sat very still. Five years ago, after we'd been bound, I had asked him once if he kept any accounts on the social platforms the younger associates used. I'm not on any of that, he'd said, dismissive, already turning away. I don't have the time for it.

So it had been a lie. Of course it had been a lie. He simply hadn't wanted me watching. Hadn't wanted me to see the soft underbelly of a man who had none of it left for the wife who wore his crest.

The phone hummed a second time. An email this time, and the sight of the sender's name sent a different sort of cold through me. Don Lena Falcone. The release papers. The formal documents that would return me to the Valente Family, my own blood, the bloodline that ran older and deeper than anything the Morettis could claim. I downloaded the file and let the screen go dark in my palm. Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I would print it. Tomorrow I would begin to climb out.

In the morning the doorbell rang just as I set down my fork. I'd eaten alone again, the way I always did now, a plate of pancakes going cold in a house full of silence and the faint, lingering ghost of Turkish tobacco that clung to Lorenzo's study.

I rose to answer it, but before I'd taken two steps Lorenzo came out of the living room in a rush, moving with a speed he never spent on me, and reached the front door first.

Minutes passed. When he came back into the dining room he carried two bouquets, one in each hand. Roses, deep and bloodred, and peonies, pale and lush.

"You bought flowers," I said, and I heard the foolish hope thread through my own voice before I could strangle it.

"Here. These are for you." He held out the peonies, almost without looking at me. I didn't take them.

"I'm allergic to peonies. I've told you. More times than I can count." The words came out flat, my mood sinking like a stone dropped into deep water.

His face did something between surprise and irritation. "You've never said a word about it. Not once in five years."

"I have." I let my hand drift toward the roses instead, toward the only thing in his grip that wouldn't make my throat close. "Just give me the roses, then."

He stepped back. The roses moved out of my reach, deliberate, a small precise withdrawal, and a scowl settled over his features as his voice dropped to that cold, clipped register the men in the Family knew to fear. "If you don't want the peonies, throw them in the bin. But these aren't yours."

My heart clenched so hard it stole my breath. "Then who are they for?"

Were they for her? For Carla? How could he stand in his own dining room and treat his mistress more tenderly than the woman whose hand he'd taken in front of the whole territory?

He didn't answer. He set the peonies down on the table between us, the way a man sets down something he no longer cares to hold, and the silence in the room grew thick enough to choke on.

I reached to the chair beside me and lifted the thing I'd found that morning, tangled in our sheets. A black thong, fine lace, not mine. I held it up between two fingers, my face carefully smooth, carefully empty.

"Whose is this?"

"I—" he began.

"Is it Carla's?"

For half a heartbeat the mask slipped and something close to panic crossed his face. His thumb found the heavy signet ring on his hand and began to roll it, around and around. "I don't know how that ended up here," he said quickly. "Give it to me. I'll see that it's returned to her."

He plucked it from my fingers and was already moving, already shifting the air of the room toward the door. "Come on. I'll take you out for breakfast."

I stared at his back, genuinely thrown. He never took me anywhere. He took her, always her, to every restaurant on the family's turf, every quiet table in every front the Morettis owned. And yet here he was, offering it to me now.

But I was standing in the dining room. The empty plate sat plain on the table, the fork laid across it, the pancakes long finished. Any man with eyes would have known I'd already eaten. It seemed he hadn't looked at me at all, not once, not really, in longer than I cared to remember.