Chapter 3

They drove east. I followed.

The Maserati pulled up outside Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue. He got out first, came around, opened her door. She took his hand like she'd done it a thousand times.

New Year's Eve morning, sidewalk packed with shoppers, and the two of them walked through the front entrance without so much as a glance over their shoulders.

I parked across the street, pulled my collar up, and followed them in.

Sienna moved through the store the way she moved through everything — unhurried, certain, as if the air parted for her out of courtesy. Luca walked beside her with his hand at the base of her spine, his thumb tracing a slow circle against the cashmere of her coat.

The same circle he used to trace on the inside of my wrist.

She leaned into him and laughed at something he said — light, easy, the laugh of a woman who had never once been told to wait in a car.

They stopped in the women's department first. Sienna held a cashmere coat against herself and turned to Luca with her eyebrows raised. He nodded once, the way a man nods when he's been answering the same question for years. She draped it over her arm and kept moving.

A silk blouse. Leather gloves. A dress — black, cut low in the back — that she held up against her body while Luca watched with quiet, undivided attention.

He paid for everything without looking at the total.

Then they crossed to the shoe floor. Sienna sat on the velvet bench, and Luca — the man who once told me he didn't kneel for anyone — crouched in front of her and slid a heel onto her foot with his own hands.

She smiled down at him. He looked up at her. And his face — open, soft, unhurried. A version of him I'd spent seven years trying to earn.

She got it for free.

The saleswoman glanced between them and beamed. "Your wife has exquisite taste."

Neither of them corrected her.

I stood behind a display rack with my nails digging crescents into my palms, copper flooding the back of my throat.

Seven years of marriage, and Luca Marchetti had never once bought me clothing. Not a scarf. Not a pair of earrings. Not even a birthday card with any thought behind it.

I used to linger outside jewelry store windows when we walked through the city. I'd slow down, let my gaze catch on something — nothing extravagant, just a thin chain, a simple pendant.

He always noticed. And every time, the same answer in the same measured tone: "You don't need that stuff, Clara. It's decorative. A waste."

So I'd swallow the want and keep walking, feeling foolish for having let it surface at all.

Now I watched him hand over a black card for a pair of shoes that cost more than my car payment — because Sienna Valenti looked at them and her eyes lit up.

That was all it took.A look.

Their last stop was a jeweler on the second floor. Sienna pointed at something in the case — a watch, slim, mother-of-pearl face — and Luca signaled the attendant before she'd even finished speaking.

He fastened it around her wrist himself, fingers lingering on the clasp. She held her arm up to the light, and he kissed her temple — brief, automatic, the way you do something your body has stopped asking permission for.

The overhead lights caught the watch face and threw a sliver of cold white across my vision. I turned away.

They left the store and climbed back into the Maserati. I followed at a distance until the car pulled into the underground garage of the Langham on Fifth Avenue.

I parked on the street and waited.

Through the lobby windows I watched them approach the front desk. A key card was produced. They walked to the elevator. The doors closed.

I sat in my car and counted to three hundred.

Then I picked up my phone and called my husband.

Six rings. Music in the background — soft, muffled, the kind hotels pipe through ceiling speakers.

"Hey." Easy. Relaxed. Not a crack in it.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Just got to my father's place. They're setting up for tonight — you know how it is. Chaos." A short laugh. "What's up?"

"Luca." I thinned my voice out, let it shake the way it used to when I was genuinely afraid. "Something's wrong. My chest — I can't breathe. It hurts, like something's pressing down."

Silence on the other end.

He knew about the arrhythmia. The cardiologist had flagged it two years ago — nothing critical, but a shadow that lingered on every EKG.

"Since when? Did you take your medication?"

"I took it. It's not working. Can you come home? I don't think I can drive myself to the hospital."

I let the pauses stretch. Let my breathing come shallow and uneven.

"I —" He stumbled.

I could hear the calculation running behind the silence. Coming home meant leaving Sienna in a hotel room. It meant fabricating an excuse. It meant exposure — and Luca Marchetti had built his entire life around the elimination of risk.

But if he didn't come, and something actually happened —

Then a voice drifted through the line. Faint. Female. Almost swallowed by the music.

"Luca? The bath's ready. Water's perfect."

Soft. Intimate. The voice of a woman calling a man back to bed.

The air in my lungs turned to cement.

Luca heard what I heard. Panic replaced calculation in an instant.

"Clara, listen — I can't leave right now." The words came fast, tripping over each other. "My father's got half the capos in the dining room, I'm in the middle of — just call 911, okay? They'll get there faster than I would."

A beat. Then lower:

"I have to go. They're calling me in."

The line went dead.

I lowered the phone and rested it on my thigh.

The screen dimmed. Then went dark.

And with it, the last fragile thread of something I'd been calling hope — though it was probably never that at all — finally snapped clean.