10. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
I answered on the nineteenth call.
Not because I wanted to talk to him, or because I’d forgiven anything, or forgotten anything, or felt even the smallest flicker of doubt about the suitcase I’d packed and the plane I’d boarded and the rings I’d left on top of my father’s murder file.
I answered because the phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.
Nineteen calls in four hours. Nineteen times the screen had lit up with his name, insistent and desperate and so utterly Giovanni, the man who had never accepted a no in his life, who had built an empire on the assumption that every obstacle was just a problem that hadn’t been solved yet.
I was in a safehouse in Boston, one of Declan’s properties, a narrow brownstone that smelled like dust and disuse. The burner phone sat on the kitchen counter, vibrating itself toward the edge with each new call. I watched it like it was a bomb. Like it might explode if I touched it.
Call number nineteen. The screen glowed. GIOVANNI.
I picked it up.
“Stop calling this number.”
Silence. Then his voice, gravel and panic wearing a suit, barely contained chaos pretending to be calm: “Where the hell are you? Kylie, I came back early and the study - the rings - what were you thinking-”
“I was thinking clearly for the first time in years.”
“Get your ass home.” The words came out hard, commanding, the voice of someone used to giving orders and having them followed. “I’m NOT divorcing you. Whatever this is - whatever you think you need - we can work it out. Just come home and we’ll talk.”
The laugh that came out of me wasn’t kind. It wasn’t even really mine, it was three years of swallowed words finding a voice all at once, and it scared me a little, how ugly it sounded.
“You left the marriage years ago, Giovanni.” My voice was shaking now, every scrap of the composure I’d been holding gone. “I’m just returning the paperwork.”
“That’s not - I never left. I was right there, every day, I was-”
“You were in the room. That’s not the same thing.
” I walked to the window, looked out at the unfamiliar street.
Someone else’s neighborhood. Someone else’s life.
“You were in the room while you kept secrets that were mine to know. While you let another woman learn my kitchen, my recipes, my rituals. While you decided, over and over, that protecting me from the truth was more important than letting me be part of it.”
“The file - your father - I was trying to-”
“I know what you were trying to do. I’ve heard the speech.
Protection. Safety. The greater good of the family.
” My voice stayed steady, but my hand was shaking where it held the phone.
“But here’s what you never understood: I didn’t marry you for protection.
I married you because I thought we were partners.
Because I thought that when it mattered - when it really, truly mattered - you’d trust me with the hard things. ”
“I do trust you.”
“You trust me to host your dinners and smile at your guests and be the donna you needed. You never trusted me with yourself.”
Silence. Long and heavy and full of everything he couldn’t say. Then, when he spoke again, the pleading was gone and the don was back, low and certain, the voice of a man who had never once been told no and believed it.
“You’re my wife. You don’t get to vanish into one of Declan’s safehouses and mail me a decision like it’s a-”
“Like a business decision?” The words came out of me like broken glass. “You’d know. You made one about my father and sat on it for two years. Funny how the paperwork feels when it’s your name on it.”
It landed. I heard it land, hundreds of miles away, the caught breath, the silence after. For one second it was the most honest the two of us had been in years.
“That was cruel,” he said finally. Quiet.
“So was two years of silence. Now we match.”
“Come home.” The don was gone again. What was left was just a man, stripped down to pleading. “Please, Kylie. We’ll start over. No more secrets, no more files, no more-”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s not. It can’t be. I refuse to accept-”
“That’s the problem, Giovanni.” I turned away from the window, walked back toward the counter where the safehouse’s ancient coffee maker sat cold and unused.
“You’ve never accepted anything. You’ve negotiated, maneuvered, controlled.
But acceptance requires surrender, and you don’t know how to do that. ”
“I can learn.”
“Maybe you can. But you won’t learn it from me. Not anymore.”
I hung up on the don of New York.
It felt incredible for about four seconds.
Then the weight of what I’d done crashed over me, the finality of it, the irreversibility, and I had to sit down on the floor of that dusty kitchen with my back against the cabinets and my head in my hands, breathing through the aftermath of a bomb I’d chosen to detonate.
***
The next three weeks were a lesson in what it meant to be a don’s runaway wife.
Declan moved me twice. First from Boston to a safehouse in New Hampshire, then from New Hampshire to a rental in Vermont that had been scrubbed so clean of any connection to the Jordans that even I couldn’t trace how I’d gotten there.
The windows got checked nightly. A man named Tommy sat on the door, young, quiet, armed, with the kind of patient watchfulness that said he’d been doing this work for a long time.
“It’s not personal,” Declan had said when I’d asked why the security was so heavy.
“A don’s wife walking out - that’s news.
That’s opportunity. Every enemy Giovanni has is going to want to know where you are.
Some of them are going to want to use you as leverage.
Others are going to want to use you as a message. ”
“I’m not his wife anymore.”
“You are until the papers say different. And even then-” He’d shrugged, his face grim. “Blood doesn’t wash off, Kylie. You know that.”
I knew it. I’d lived it for five years, watching Giovanni navigate the constant calculations of threat and alliance, the endless chess game of who might do what and why. I’d just never been a piece on the board before.
Now I was.
The divorce papers arrived by courier on day eight. Giovanni had contested everything.
Not the assets, that was the part that made his attorneys keep calling Declan in baffled confusion, their voices rising with each conversation.
“He’s offered her the houses. All of them.
The accounts, the investments, the property in Italy.
He keeps saying she can have whatever she wants, he doesn’t care about any of it.
” They’d pause, clearly expecting this to mean something to me.
“He just won’t sign the dissolution agreement. ”
He wasn’t fighting for the money.
He was fighting for the marriage itself.
I should have expected it. This was Giovanni’s way, if he couldn’t win the war, he’d make the war impossible to finish. Drag it out. Stall it. Force so many delays and complications that eventually the other side would give up just to make it stop.
But I wasn’t going to give up.
Declan ran interference with the lawyers while I stayed locked in my Vermont safehouse, pacing the small rooms like an animal in a cage. The Jordan aunts, my father’s sisters, women I barely knew but who had decided that my situation was now family business, started calling with suggestions.
“There’s a lovely man in South Boston,” Aunt Maura said over the phone. “Widower. Runs a construction company. Very respectable.”
“I’m not looking for a husband.”
“You need protection, Kylie girl. A woman alone in this world-”
“I have protection. I have Declan’s people.”
“Declan’s people aren’t going to keep you warm at night.” Her voice turned sly. “This man - Padraig, his name is - he has a nice house. Good shoulders. I’ve seen him lift things.”
“Aunt Maura.”
“I’m just saying. You think about it.”
I hung up on her too. It was becoming a habit.
***
Then, on day twenty-two, it stopped.
A courier at the door, different from the ones before, dressed better, with the kind of professional neutrality that said he’d been hired by someone expensive. He handed me an envelope without a word and left before I could ask questions.
Inside: the signed divorce papers.
Giovanni’s signature on every page. Clean, decisive, final. No more delays, no more contests, no more legal maneuvering. Just his name, in ink, giving me what I’d asked for.
And on the last page, in the margin, in the white space where witnesses’ signatures were supposed to go, his cramped handwriting.
The handwriting I’d learned to read over three years of marriage, the one that was all sharp angles and compressed letters, like even his penmanship was trying to save time.
You’re right. I broke it. I won’t cage you too. G
I read the words three times.
Then I read them again.
Then I sat down on the floor of that safehouse kitchen, the same way I’d sat down in Boston, back against the cabinets, head in my hands, and felt the floor of my whole life give way.
It was over.
After everything, the secrets, the betrayal, the months of feeling invisible in my own house, it was actually over. I was free. Divorced. Released from the cage I hadn’t even fully recognized until I’d broken out of it.
I should have felt triumphant. Should have felt vindicated, justified, all the things a woman was supposed to feel when she escaped a marriage that had been suffocating her.
Instead I just felt empty.
Like the anger that had been holding me together had drained out all at once, and what was left was just… hollow. A shell of a person sitting on a cold kitchen floor, holding a piece of paper that said she was no longer anyone’s wife.
I lost track of how long I stayed on that floor. The light through the windows shifted, the shadows crawled longer across the boards, and somewhere in there my legs went numb and my back began to ache and my hands finally stopped shaking where they held the papers.
Eventually, I stood.
I needed, something. Air. Movement. A reminder that I was still alive, that my body still worked, that there was more to me than the grief that had settled into my bones.
The bathroom was small and dated, with a mirror that had started to silver around the edges. I ran cold water, splashed it on my face, looked at my reflection without really seeing it.
I looked tired. Pale. My eyes were red-rimmed, my hair a mess, my skin sallow from weeks of safehouse living and minimal sunlight.
But there was something else, too.
Something I’d been noticing for days and deliberately not thinking about.
The way my body felt different, heavier somehow, more present.
The constant low-grade nausea that I’d blamed on stress and grief and the endless anxiety of being hunted.
The exhaustion that went deeper than sleepless nights could explain.
I dried my face with a hand towel. Walked back to the kitchen.
The drugstore bag was still on the counter where I’d left it three days ago.
I’d bought it on a supply run with Tommy, grabbed it almost without thinking, stuffed it under the box of granola bars before he could see.
Told myself I was just being paranoid. Told myself it was impossible, ridiculous, the universe couldn’t be that cruel.
I took the box out of the bag.
Went back to the bathroom.
Read the instructions three times even though I already knew them by heart.
Waited the three minutes.
Looked down.
Two pink lines.
I was carrying his child.
Divorced nine hours.