Chapter 4

The club dinner had been the rehearsal. Tonight was supposed to be the real thing.

Alessandro kept his true anniversary separate from the family's calendar — quieter, just the two of them, dinner at home, candles instead of chandeliers. Six years of that tradition, and it had always felt like the one thing that belonged only to us.

I dressed for it anyway. Ivory this time, not blood-red. Told myself the color didn't mean anything.

Table set by seven. Two places, the good silver, the same Barolo we shared the night he proposed. Candles lit by eight. By nine, the wax had pooled onto the tablecloth and I was still sitting there, back straight, hands folded, waiting the way I'd learned to wait for a man who never once explained his absences.

At nine-forty, my phone lit up. A text from a cousin I barely speak to: You should see this. Alex is here.

A photo. Isabella's welcome party, at the club, the same room where I'd taken off my ring three nights before. The same cousins. The same wives who'd cheered the toast. And Alessandro at the center of it, her hand tucked through his arm, both of them laughing at something out of frame.

He hadn't mentioned a second party. He hadn't mentioned it at all.

I sat with the candles until they burned out on their own. I didn't cry. Somewhere in the last three days, the part of me that used to cry over this man had gone quiet, and something colder had taken its place.

He came home past midnight, tie loose, the unhurried walk of a man pleased with his evening. He found me at the dead table, wine untouched, and had the grace to look briefly uncertain.

"You waited up," he said. Like it was a kindness I'd performed.

"It's our anniversary." Second time that week I'd said it. Smaller now. Worn thin.

"I know. Sorry — it ran long. Isabella's party." Said the way you'd mention traffic. Then, brightening: "I got you something, actually. Didn't forget."

He set a small box in front of me, pleased with himself, like a man closing an account.

Perfume. Pale gold in a narrow crystal bottle. A brand I recognized instantly — not because I wear it, but because I'd smelled it three nights ago, on Isabella's wrist, while she leaned in to whisper something in his ear on the dance floor.

The exact same bottle.

I understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that he hadn't chosen this for me at all. He'd told an assistant to buy two of whatever Isabella liked, and it never once occurred to him that his wife might want to smell like herself.

I didn't raise my voice. I'd stopped expecting that to work a long time ago.

"Alex." I set the box down between the dead candles. "I want to ask you something. Answer quickly. Don't think about it."

He sat back, loosening his tie further, amused. "All right."

"If you had to choose between me and Isabella — who would you choose?"

I watched his face. Six years of studying every version of it, and I watched now for even a flicker of hesitation. One second where the question cost him something.

There wasn't one.

"Isabella," he said. Immediately. Almost gently, like he was doing me a favor by not making me wait.

The silence after lasted maybe a second. It felt longer.

Then I smiled — not the party smile, a new one, quieter, that didn't reach my eyes and wasn't trying to.

"Thank you," I said.

He blinked. Whatever he'd braced for, it wasn't that. "Thank you?"

"For answering honestly." I stood, smoothed the ivory silk at my hips, picked the perfume box back up, and set it down again — precisely, in the center of the ruined tablecloth. "You have no idea how much easier that makes everything."

I left him there, still half-smiling in confusion, already reaching for his phone.

I didn't go to our bedroom. I went to the small office off the library that had always, technically, been mine — the room Alessandro never bothered with because he found filing tedious — and I locked the door. First time in six years.

I sat at the desk. Opened the bottom drawer, the one with the false back I'd built into it myself, years ago, for documents my husband didn't know existed.

And I started a list.

Everything I'd need. Everything I'd take. Everyone who owed me a debt they didn't know I intended to collect.

Three lines in, my phone buzzed once on the desk beside me.

Unknown number. No name.

I know who you really are. And I know what he's planning to do about it. We need to talk — before Thursday.