Chapter 2

My thumb slipped. The screen went black.

I turned around. Luca stood in the kitchen doorway, dish towel slung over his shoulder, eyes locked on the phone in my hand.

"Clara." His voice dropped half a register — not angry yet, but close. "Why are you holding my phone?"

"It kept buzzing." I handed it back without hesitation. "Sounded urgent. You were running the water, so I grabbed it."

He took it, glanced at the dark screen, then back at me. Reading me. Luca Marchetti had spent his whole life in rooms full of liars — he could smell a bluff the way other men smelled rain.

But the screen was locked now. Whatever I'd seen was sealed behind glass.

The suspicion in his eyes dimmed. Not gone — filed away.

"I'm gonna shower," he said, and disappeared down the hall.

The bathroom door clicked shut. Water hissed through the pipes.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my palms flat against my knees to stop them from shaking. My heartbeat sat so high in my throat I could taste it.

Minutes later the water stopped. Luca walked out with a towel low around his hips, steam still clinging to his shoulders. He sat beside me — close enough that I could feel the heat rolling off his skin. His hand found my thigh.

"It's been a while," he murmured. His thumb traced a slow circle above my knee. "Come here."

His voice was low. Unhurried. The voice he saved for this room, for this bed — the one that used to make me forget my own name.

A year ago — six months ago, even — I would've turned into him without thinking. Let his hands find the hem of my shirt, let his mouth land on that spot below my ear where he always started.

He knew exactly what that voice did to me. He'd always known.

But now all I could see were those photographs. His hand on Sienna's back. Her head on his shoulder. That smile.

Had he touched her like this? On all those holiday nights I spent alone — had she been the one sitting on the edge of his bed, feeling the heat of his skin, hearing this same voice say come here?

I shifted away before his fingers could climb higher.

He froze.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm tired." I stood and walked to the dresser, poured myself a glass of water from the carafe. The cold shocked my throat, pushed the nausea down. "Long day."

He stayed on the bed, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite name. Not hurt — Luca Marchetti didn't do hurt. Something closer to confusion. A man reaching for a switch that had always been there and finding empty wall.

I kept my back to him. Stared out the window at the city below — a thousand lit windows, a thousand families getting ready for tomorrow night.

"Luca." I kept my voice neutral. "Hypothetically — if an outsider did show up at a Marchetti gathering, what would actually happen?"

Silence behind me. Then the creak of bedsprings as he shifted his weight.

"You know what would happen." His tone cooled. "My father doesn't make empty rules. Anyone who breaks protocol gets dealt with in front of the whole family. You don't test Don Enzo, Clara. Not even I test Don Enzo."

"Dealt with how?"

"Depends on how generous he's feeling." A pause. "Best case, you're humiliated publicly. He makes you stand while everyone sits, or seats you at the service entrance with the staff. Worst case —"

He exhaled. "He revokes the name. Cuts you off. Not just from the family — from everything the family touches. The businesses. The protection. All of it. You become nobody overnight."

Another pause, heavier.

"Which is why I've never pushed it, Clara. It's not that I don't want you there. The cost is too high."

The cost is too high.

I tightened my grip on the glass until my knuckles went white.

"Got it," I said. "I think I'll sleep in the guest room tonight. I need some quiet."

He hesitated — I could feel it in the air behind me. But he didn't reach for me. Didn't ask me to stay.

He let me go.

I lay in the guest bed with my eyes open until the ceiling turned grey with dawn.

Seven years unspooled behind my eyelids like a film reel I couldn't shut off.

The first Christmas after we married — I'd sat alone in this living room with a store-bought rotisserie chicken and a half-bottle of wine, watching It's a Wonderful Life on mute while fireworks cracked in the distance.

He called at eleven. It's crazy here, babe. My uncles won't stop arguing. I'll make it up to you tomorrow.

I told him I understood. I meant it.

The second year, I made a tiramisu from his mother's recipe and had it delivered to the Marchetti estate gates. It never reached him.

He told me later the staff must have lost it. He said it was sweet of me to try, though. I apologized for the trouble.

Year after year. The same excuse wrapped in the same gentle voice. The same version of me — alone in this apartment, telling herself that patience was a form of love.

Now I knew patience was just another word for blindness.

At first light, I heard the master bedroom door open.

Luca moved through the apartment with a soldier's quiet — shower, clothes, cologne. The scent reached me through the guest room door. Tom Ford. The one he only wore when he was going somewhere that mattered.

He didn't come to the guest room. Didn't knock.

The front door closed. His footsteps faded down the corridor.

I was dressed and in the parking garage within three minutes.

His black Maserati pulled out of the building onto the main road. I followed in my Honda three cars back — the kind of invisible, forgettable sedan that a Marchetti wife shouldn't be driving but always did.

He didn't take the highway toward his father's estate on the north shore.

He turned east. Toward the waterfront high-rises.

The car stopped outside a luxury building with a glass lobby and a doorman in a grey coat. Luca stayed in the driver's seat. Two minutes passed.

Then she walked out.

Dark hair. Camel coat. Heels that clicked even from a distance. She moved with the kind of certainty that doesn't come from confidence — it comes from knowing you're expected.

Sienna Valenti opened the passenger door and slid in like she'd done it a thousand times before.

Through the windshield, sixty feet away, I watched my husband lean across the center console and pull her into him.

She went easily — no hesitation, no awkwardness. Her arms circled his neck. His hand cradled the back of her head.

They kissed the way people kiss when they've stopped counting.

A jogger passed the car without glancing over. A mother pushed a stroller on the opposite sidewalk. The world kept moving. Nobody cared.

I sat behind the wheel of my Honda, engine off, hands resting in my lap.

I waited for the rage. The grief. The chest-crushing, vision-blurring devastation that was supposed to come.

Nothing arrived.

Just a vast, Arctic silence — the kind that settles over a landscape after everything that could burn has already turned to ash.

Maybe that's what it feels like when the heart finally gives up.