9. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
He left for Palermo on Thursday.
I watched from the guest suite window as the car pulled away, black and gleaming in the early morning light. He’d come to say goodbye the night before, stood in my doorway, a stranger asking permission to enter, his face arranged in an expression I almost didn’t recognize.
Uncertainty. Giovanni Ferraro, uncertain.
“I’ll be back Saturday night,” he’d said. “Sunday morning at the latest. We’ll have the whole day.”
“Travel safe.”
He’d hesitated, wanting more. Wanting me to meet him halfway, to offer some sign that Sunday would matter, that there was still something left to save. I gave him nothing. Just stood there with my hands folded and my face neutral and waited for him to leave.
He’d kissed my forehead before he went. A benediction, or maybe a prayer.
I felt nothing.
Now, watching his car disappear around the corner, I let myself breathe for what felt like the first time in days.
It was time.
***
The cash had been accumulating for weeks.
Small withdrawals from the household account, the one Giovanni had set up for me when we married, the one that refilled itself automatically every month, a wound that wouldn’t close.
Never more than a few hundred at a time, never enough to trigger any alerts.
Just a steady trickle of twenties and fifties, tucked into an envelope in my drafting kit.
I’d started after the overheard conversation. Before I’d had words for what I was feeling or plans for what I’d do, some part of me had known. Had started preparing. Had begun building the foundation for a departure I hadn’t yet admitted I’d make.
The envelope was thick now. Enough to disappear with. Enough to start over, if starting over was something a person could actually do.
The burner phone was from one of Declan’s men, a quiet transaction in a coffee shop three blocks from the brownstone, the kind of place where no one knew my face and no one asked questions.
Pay-as-you-go. Untraceable. The only number programmed into it was Declan’s, because if everything went wrong, he was the one person I could trust to find me.
No cards. No plates. No goodbyes that could be questioned later.
I’d learned enough in five years to know how women disappeared in this world, and how they got found.
The wife of a Calabrese underboss had tried to run three years ago, had made it all the way to Arizona before her credit card pinged at a gas station outside of Flagstaff.
They’d brought her back. No one talked about what had happened after.
I wasn’t going to be her.
One suitcase went with me. The small one, the carry-on I’d used for weekend trips when weekend trips were something we still did.
My clothes, the ones I’d bought myself, before the marriage, before the makeover into someone Giovanni’s world would accept.
Jeans and sweaters and the leather jacket my mother had given me for my thirtieth birthday.
My drafting tools, because I wasn’t leaving my hands behind.
The license I’d worked for, the degree I’d earned, the skills that were mine before they became ornamental.
Nothing Ferraro.
The gowns stayed in the closet, silk and satin and Valentino whispering against each other in the dark.
The jewelry he’d given me stayed in its velvet boxes, diamonds and emeralds and the pearl necklace he’d presented on our first anniversary, the one that had made me cry because I’d still believed it meant something.
I kept my grandmother’s ring. My mother’s earrings. The charm bracelet from before.
Everything else was costume.
The study was quiet when I went in.
Giovanni’s desk looked the same as always, the leather blotter, the antique lamp, the papers arranged with military precision.
But something had shifted in how I saw it now.
The room that had once felt like the heart of the house, the place where power lived and decisions were made, now just looked like an office.
Just a room where a man worked, no different from any other room in any other house.
I opened the safe again. Took out the file, my father’s file, the one with the Ferraro seal and the truth that had been kept from me for six years.
I placed it on the desk. Open. The page with the date facing up, the one that proved he’d known for two years while he kissed my hair and told me about his day.
Then I took off my rings.
The wedding band first. Simple platinum, sized perfectly, warm from my skin. I’d worn it for three years. Had gotten so used to its weight that I’d stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat.
I noticed now. Noticed the lightness as it slid off, the unfamiliar sensation of bare skin where it had been.
The engagement ring next. The Ferraro diamond, passed down through four generations of donnas, given to me on a balcony in Rome while the city glittered below us and Giovanni said words I’d believed were true.
I stacked them on top of the file.
Let them catch the light from the window, two circles of platinum and gold resting on the evidence of everything he’d hidden.
My signature. My goodbye. My answer to a question he hadn’t known he’d asked.
I left the study and closed the door behind me.
***
Donna Rosa was waiting in the foyer.
She was dressed for going out, a coat over her arm, keys in her hand, that purposeful energy she got when she’d made a decision and nothing was going to stop her.
“Tesoro.” She looked at my suitcase, my casual clothes, my face scrubbed bare of makeup. Didn’t ask any questions. “You’re not taking a car service.”
“I was going to call a cab.”
“You’re not calling a cab.” She opened the front door, jerked her head toward the street. “I’m driving.”
“Rosa-”
“I’m driving.”
Her car was a Mercedes, older but immaculate, the kind of car that announced money without advertising it. She drove the way she did everything, confidently, aggressively, with complete disregard for posted speed limits.
“He’s going to come after you,” she said, running a yellow light that had turned red halfway through. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“He’s going to tear this city apart looking for you. Then he’s going to tear apart whatever city you land in. After that he’ll stand outside your door and make speeches about love and loyalty and all the things he should have said years ago.”
“I know.” I watched the streetlights slide past.
“Good.” She took a turn too fast, tires squealing. “Let him. Let him feel what it’s like to want something he can’t have. See how he likes being the one who’s left behind.”
We drove in silence for a while, the city streaming past outside the windows. Brownstones and bodegas and the ordinary business of people living their ordinary lives, unaware that in this car, a world was ending.
“My husband taught my son that silence is protection.” Rosa’s voice was quieter now, rougher.
“That a man keeps secrets to shield his family from the ugliness of the world. That the best love is the love that asks nothing and explains less.” She shook her head.
“I tried to un-teach it. For thirty years I tried. But some lessons go too deep.”
“He had two years.” The number kept catching in my throat like a bone.
“I know.”
“Two years to tell me the truth. To trust me with my own history. And instead he just - kept going. Like nothing had changed. Like I wasn’t worth the risk of honesty.”
“I know, tesoro. I know.” Rosa kept her eyes on the road, but her hands had tightened on the wheel.
The airport appeared in the distance, all glass and steel and the promise of somewhere else. Rosa pulled up to the curb, put the car in park, and turned to face me.
“Run,” she said. Her hands came up to cup my face, her palms dry and cool against my cheeks. “Run as far and as fast as you can. Build a life that has nothing to do with this family or this world or the man who couldn’t find the words to keep you.”
“And then?”
“And then-” Her eyes were bright, fierce, proud. “When he crawls after you - and he will crawl, Kylie, he will get on his knees and crawl through broken glass if that’s what it takes - make it educational.”
I laughed despite myself. A wet, broken sound that was closer to a sob than anything else.
“Take care of yourself, Rosa.”
“Worry about yourself now.” She kissed both my cheeks, the way she always did, the way her mother had done and her mother before that. “And call me when you land. Not him - me. I want to know you’re safe.”
I got out of the car, pulled my suitcase from the back seat, and stood on the curb watching her drive away.
She ran one more red light on her way out of the airport.
On principle, I suspected.
***
The flight was half-empty.
I had a window seat, booked under a name that wasn’t mine, one of Declan’s arrangements, the kind of favor that didn’t get discussed in detail.
The Jordans had closed ranks the moment I’d called, had made my paper trail disappear with the efficiency of people who’d been making things disappear for generations.
“You’re family,” Declan had said. “Whatever else happens, you’re family first. The rest is just… geography.”
Now I sat in the dark cabin, watching the lights of New York fall away beneath the clouds, and let myself feel what I’d been holding back for days.
Grief.
Not for the marriage, that had died long before I’d packed my suitcase, and not exactly for Giovanni, though there was loss there too, buried under all the anger. No, this grief was older. Deeper. The grief I’d never properly felt for my father, because I’d been grieving a lie.
He hadn’t died in an accident. He hadn’t lost control on a wet road, hadn’t been the victim of bad luck and bad timing. He’d been murdered. Executed. Removed from the board so that other pieces could move into place.
And I’d spent six years visiting a grave and talking to a headstone and telling a dead man about my life, never knowing that the life I was describing had been bought with his blood.
The tears came quietly. Just a slow leak of salt water down my cheeks, disappearing into the darkness of the cabin where no one could see.
I let them fall. Let them wash away whatever was left of the woman who’d believed in Sunday mornings and sugo and the possibility of being truly known by another person.
The burner phone lit up somewhere over the dark sprawl of New England.
I’d kept it on, against all advice, against all sense, because some part of me was still waiting. Hoping. Wanting to know if anything I’d left behind had mattered at all.
The screen glowed in the darkness of the cabin.
GIOVANNI.
Seventeen missed calls.
I stared at the number, watching it climb. Eighteen. Nineteen.
He was home early.
The phone buzzed again in my hand, insistent and desperate and too late. I could picture him in the study, finding the file and the rings, understanding finally what I’d been trying to tell him for months.
I turned off the phone and put it in my pocket.
Below me, the coastline unspooled dark and endless toward a horizon I couldn’t see. Somewhere behind me, a man I had loved was calling a number that would never answer again.
Somewhere ahead of me, a life I couldn’t yet imagine was waiting to begin.
I closed my eyes and let the plane carry me forward, into the dark, into the unknown, into whatever came next.