2

Chapter Two

I started in the closet.

Not the clothes — those could wait. I started with the things that were actually mine: the field bag on the top shelf, canvas and battered, with the peeling red-cross sticker one of the kids in Aleppo had pressed on when I wasn't looking. My Lebanese medical credentials in their waterproof sleeve. The small framed photograph of my mother that I'd kept turned face-down because looking at it in this house, in this life, always felt like an apology I couldn't finish.

I turned it face-up.

Rosa Vasquez. 1961–2007. She'd been forty-six. She'd wanted to be a doctor and instead raised one, which she insisted was better. I wasn't sure I agreed, but I'd stopped arguing with her ghost years ago.

I set the photo on top of the field bag.

The rest of it I did slowly, deliberately, the way you close a chart on a patient you've done everything you can for. My surgical manuals. My MSF equipment list. The small zippered kit of personal medications I always maintained because in the field, you couldn't rely on supply chains. These things took priority. Everything else was furniture.

The brownstone on Sixty-First Street was beautiful. Twelve-foot ceilings, original molding, a kitchen that had been renovated by someone who actually cooked. I'd been careful, the whole time I lived here, not to love it too much. I was not always successful.

The garden had been mine. The roses especially — I'd put in four different varieties the first spring, which had surprised Dominic enough that he'd stood at the kitchen window watching me for ten minutes before he went back to his calls. I didn't take the garden personally. You can't pack a garden. But I'd be lying if I said leaving it didn't cost me something small and private.

I worked through the morning while the house was still quiet.

Here is the truth about how I ended up married to the head of the Caruso crime family:

My father, Vincent Vasquez, was a man of enormous charm and poor arithmetic. He'd borrowed heavily in the mid-2000s to build a construction company, which collapsed in 2008 in the way that highly leveraged companies collapse — completely, quickly, and with remarkable damage to everyone in the radius. He'd kept the Caruso family satisfied for years with interest payments and promises. Then he couldn't.

I was in Lebanon when he called. I'd been with MSF for eighteen months — the best eighteen months of my life, which I would only understand retroactively — and I came home to find my father sitting in his study with the curtains drawn and the particular expression of a man who has run out of roads.

He explained the situation in the careful voice of someone who had been rehearsing. The Carusos. The debt. The arrangement on offer. A marriage, he said, not a sentence — these were modern men, professional men, it would be a partnership in name that gave both families what they needed.

I said no three times. Each time he found a new angle.

The fourth time, he told me he'd used my mother's death settlement as collateral.

Her settlement. The money that was supposed to be mine — that was mine, legally, once I turned twenty-five. He'd signed it over when I was still in medical school, before I could touch it.

I want to be honest: I didn't marry Dominic Caruso for love or duty or even survival. I married him because my father had made it so that refusing came at a price I wasn't willing to pay in innocents.

But there was something else.

I'd sat down across the dinner table at my own engagement and recognized the man they'd chosen for me.

Four years earlier, outside Aleppo: a gunshot wound to the left shoulder, the kind of controlled expression that meant he was managing pain rather than feeling it. He'd looked up at me from the surgery table — my hands already moving, my mask on — and said, in English, Tell me straight. Am I losing the arm?

Not if you stop moving, I said.

He almost smiled.

Two days post-op he'd produced a rose from somewhere that still mystified me — the nearest market was three kilometers away and he wasn't cleared to walk — and held it out with a steadiness that had nothing to do with anesthesia wearing off.

The doctor with the steady hands, he said. Thank you.

I didn't take it. I told him he was reckless and walked away.

He didn't recognize me at the dinner table. I'd been masked and gloved and covered in someone else's blood. Of course he didn't.

I made my decision in three seconds: say nothing. This was a transaction. The fact that I had once held this man's life in two hands meant nothing contractually. I was not going to introduce sentiment into a business arrangement.

We shook hands across the table.

We got married six weeks later.

For three years I had been careful not to think too hard about the man at the surgery table and the man in the suit and whether they were still the same person, or whether the Caruso empire had finished what the Aleppo desert started.

Now I folded my mother's photograph into the front pocket of the field bag, zipped it closed, and set the bag by the door.

It didn't matter anymore.

Two more weeks and the question would be moot.