Chapter 1

On the eve of our anniversary, my husband, Salvatore Moretti, walked hand in hand with his first love, Vittoria Rinaldi, through the marble lobby of the Family's hotel.

I dialed Salvatore's number, but the voice that answered belonged to our thirteen-year-old son, Matteo Moretti.

He said, "Papa's in a sit-down. Don't disturb him."

With that, Matteo hung up and blocked my number.

Later that night, Salvatore and Matteo punished me for disturbing the peace of the house.

They locked me out on the open balcony, where the wind howled off the hills all night, and I stood there until dawn.

This time, I really learned my lesson.

Though the fever burned through me, I set the severance papers down in front of Salvatore.

I asked the Don for a severance from the Family.

——

In the study.

Hearing the word severance, Salvatore didn't so much as lift his eyelids. He went on with his work, a pen moving across ledgers only he was ever allowed to see.

I waited there for the better part of an hour. The clock on the mantel ticked into the silence, each stroke louder than it had any right to be.

Just as I felt myself about to faint, Salvatore finally spoke.

"Adriana Fiore, you want to walk out on me because I punished you?

"But you were the one who did wrong in the first place. Shouldn't you be corrected?"

I opened my mouth. Nothing came.

For the first time, I killed the urge to defend myself.

I only pointed at the papers and said, "Sign them."

Salvatore didn't notice the change in me. His thumb turned the wedding band on his finger, slow and idle, the way it always did when nothing before him mattered.

He said, careless, "The boy stays with me. He carries the name. You have any objection to that?"

I shook my head. At that, Salvatore raised an eyebrow, mildly surprised.

Still, to make a show of fairness before his own household, he called Matteo in.

Then Salvatore asked him, "Your mother and I are severing. Who do you want to stay with?"

Matteo was the Don's son, and they were alike in more ways than blood. Beyond the face, there was the way they both looked at me. Aloof. Indifferent.

Matteo said, "My name is Moretti. Not Fiore."

Once, hearing that sentence would have kept me up the whole night, weeping into the dark where no one could see. But what had happened out on that balcony had already destroyed my last hope. And whatever love I had carried for Matteo had gone with it.

Without looking at him, I turned and walked back to my room.

For thirteen years I had tended to Salvatore and Matteo, every day, with everything I had. In doing so I had let myself vanish. There was almost nothing in that whole compound that was truly mine.

It took me less than ten minutes to pack all I owned.

When I came out with my case, Salvatore was on the sofa, watching the numbers scroll across the market feeds that turned the Family's laundered cash into more of the same.

He didn't look up.

"Where will you go? I'll have a soldier drive you," he said.

"No need," I answered, flat.

I fought down the fever and the swimming in my head and walked slowly toward the gate.

Just then a golf ball came flying from the second floor and struck the back of my head, hard.

It came from Matteo's game room. He always practiced his indoor swing after finishing his lessons, the way his father had taught him a made man did nothing by halves.

Both Salvatore and Matteo watched me clutch my head and fold to the ground in pain.

They only traded a glance, as if to say, there she goes again.

I struggled on the floor for half an hour. Neither of them came.

In the end, cold sweat soaking through me, I crawled out of the Moretti compound and went alone to the hospital for a drip.

When the fever broke I left and boarded a bus out past the reach of the Family, out toward the neutral country in the hills.

Two hours later I reached my grandmother's house.

My sudden arrival left my grandmother, Rosaria Fiore, overjoyed. But she asked me nothing.

She went straight to the kitchen and made me omelets, humming an old Neapolitan lullaby low under her breath as her hands worked.

When Matteo was small he had loved omelets the way I did. Sometimes he ate too many and his stomach ached and he cried and reached for me to hold him.

When he was about six, a boy from a branch of the Moretti line came to the compound to play with him. He told Matteo that omelets were peasant food, that only bumpkins ate such things.

After that, Matteo would no longer let me bring him Rosaria's homemade omelets.

I ate too fast and got the hiccups. I had to thump my own chest to make them stop.

Watching me, Rosaria laughed, and her humming went on unbroken. "There now, Adriana. Still my little girl."

So I wouldn't catch a strand of hair, she took my messy black hair in her trembling, wrinkled hands and combed it out and braided it.

For years I had lain awake, night after night. That night I slept, deep and whole.

I knew I was finally home.

Two days later, Salvatore called.

He asked me coldly, "Where's the silk shirt I bought abroad last year?"

On instinct I told him the exact place, and added that he should wear the tie set on the far left of the compartment, the one that paired with it.

A few seconds passed. Then came the soft rustle of Salvatore pulling the shirt on.