After Love Turned to Ashes, I Chose Myself

As I was being attacked by a stray dog gone rabid on the access road behind the Falcone compound while carrying a child no one in the Family knew about, it just so happened that Dominic Falcone's armored sedan was pulling out of the rear gate with his personal courier beside him.

I heard the tires slow on gravel. For one desperate, airless second I believed the car would stop. My voice tore out of me raw, barely human, the kind of sound a woman makes only when pride has already left her body. I screamed his name. I screamed for help. The dog had knocked me sideways into the drainage culvert and its weight pressed my belly into the wet concrete, and the only thing left in the world was the black silhouette of that car through the iron fence and the animal's breath hot against the back of my neck.

Hearing my hoarse cries for help, Dominic covered Adriana Bellini's ears.

He said, "Don't listen, don't look, or you'll have nightmares tonight."

Then the window glided up, and the sedan accelerated down the service lane and was gone.

I remember the silence after the engine noise faded. I remember thinking the silence was worse than the dog, because the dog was only an animal, and the man in that car had made a choice.

……

That evening, after the doctor at the private clinic on Mulberry Street confirmed what the emergency-room bloodwork already told me, after the procedure that took my child and left me hollow under fluorescent light with a saline drip and no one holding my hand, I was driven back to the house on Atlantic Avenue that served as the Don's private residence.

The bedroom still smelled like Dominic's cologne and something else, something floral and cheap that didn't belong. I sat on the edge of the mattress and felt the stitches pull across my forearm and calf, and when I reached for the bedside table to steady myself my fingers brushed against fabric. I pulled the drawer open further. A pair of torn black stockings, sheer, expensive enough to pass for taste, wadded carelessly into the corner as though whoever left them had been in too great a hurry to care.

It was clear how intense they had been in this bed.

The room swam. I pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth and dry-heaved until my ribs ached, until the taste of bile was all I had left, and then I sat very still and stared at the stockings and let the last six years of my life rearrange themselves into a shape I could finally see clearly.

I had been the one who kept Dominic Falcone's books pristine. I had been the one who built the labyrinth of shell companies and licensing agreements that let the Falcone territory survive three federal audits. I had laundered his cash so cleanly that even his own capos believed the hotel chain turned a legitimate profit. And he had taken every hour I gave him and spent his nights here, in our bed, with the woman who carried envelopes between his social club and the counting room and cried on cue whenever she needed him to look at her instead of me.

After the heaving stopped I picked up my phone, scrolled past every name I recognized, and dialed a number I had stored without a contact label. My thumb found the inside of my wrist and pressed once, feeling my own pulse, making sure I was still alive enough to do what came next.

The line connected on the second ring. I did not wait for a greeting.

I said, "I'll do as you say. I'll come back to take over the family operations, but you can't interfere with any of my decisions."

The pause on the other end lasted three seconds. I counted them against my heartbeat.

"Fine, as long as you come back, everything is yours to run," replied the voice, low and measured, carrying the weight of authority held in reserve for years.

I ended the call just as the front door opened downstairs.

Dominic walked in carrying a paper bag from the restaurant two blocks from the social club. The man who used to come home empty-handed now came home late and always brought back sweets and leftovers, little boxes of affection meant for someone else's palate, carried into my kitchen like evidence he couldn't be bothered to hide.

He glanced at me where I stood in the hallway, set the bag on the dining table without ceremony, and started pulling off his suit jacket as he moved toward the bathroom. His signet ring caught the overhead light for an instant, and I noticed, as I always noticed, the way his thumb rested against it, neither turning it nor holding it still, perfectly indifferent.

He showed no interest in who I had been talking to or what we had been discussing. In six years I had never once received a question about my phone calls. I was furniture that balanced his books.