11. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
I sat in the back row with my suitcase wedged between my feet and my hand pressed flat against my stomach, as if I could feel something there already.
I couldn’t, of course. It was too early for that, too soon for anything but the knowledge itself, the terrifying, impossible, life-altering knowledge that I was no longer just running from a marriage.
I was running with someone.
Declan had wanted me to stay in Vermont. “Give it time,” he’d said. “A few more weeks, maybe a month. Let the situation settle. Let Giovanni’s attention move to something else.”
“His attention isn’t going to move.”
“Then let me handle it. We have resources, Kylie. People who can make sure you’re safe while you figure out-” He’d gestured vaguely at my midsection, unable to say the word. “The next steps.”
But I couldn’t stay there. Couldn’t spend another day in a safehouse with checked windows and men on the door, waiting for Giovanni’s lawyers or Giovanni’s enemies or Giovanni himself to find me.
I needed somewhere new. Somewhere that had nothing to do with any of this, not the Ferraros, not the Jordans, not the whole tangled web of alliances and blood debts that had shaped my life for the past five years.
Savannah had been my mother’s suggestion, years ago, back when we still spoke. “If you ever need to disappear,” she’d said, “go somewhere they’d never think to look. Somewhere pretty and slow and full of strangers who mind their own business.”
She’d been talking about escaping my father’s legacy, back when I’d been young enough to believe escape was possible. I’d filed it away and forgotten it. But now, sitting on a Greyhound bus watching the highway unfold in the darkness, I remembered.
Savannah.
Where nobody knew my name and nobody feared my husband and nobody would look twice at a pregnant woman starting over.
I found the Marlowe on my third day in the city.
It was a movie palace from the 1920s, crumbling and glorious, wedged between a coffee shop and a vintage clothing store on a square I’d stumbled into while looking for somewhere to eat.
The facade was all cracked plaster and faded gilt, with marquee letters that had rusted into illegibility decades ago.
The doors were padlocked, but through the dirty windows I could see hints of what lay inside: a lobby with marble floors and water-stained frescoes, chandeliers hanging at wrong angles, the skeleton of something that had once been beautiful.
I fell in love on sight.
The way I’d fallen in love with buildings my whole life, with the bones of them, the potential in them, the stories they told even in ruin. This one said I was magnificent once, and I could be again, if someone would just care enough to try.
“You looking for something, sugar?”
The woman who asked was somewhere north of eighty, with steel-gray hair pinned up in a style that hadn’t been fashionable since Kennedy was president and a voice like sweet tea and sandpaper.
She’d come out of the coffee shop next door and was watching me peer through the Marlowe’s windows with an expression of mild curiosity.
“I’m an architect.” The words came out before I could stop them. “Restoration specialist. I was just - the building is incredible.”
“She’s a mess, is what she is.” The woman walked closer, pulled a ring of keys from somewhere in her voluminous dress. “Been trying to sell her for fifteen years. Nobody wants to take on that much heartbreak.”
“You own it?”
“Lord help me, yes.” She unlocked the padlock, pulled the chains free with practiced efficiency.
“My grandfather built her. My daddy ran her. I’ve been watching her fall apart since before you were born.
” She pushed the door open, gestured for me to follow.
“Might as well see what you’re swooning over.
I’m Dorothy Marlowe. Most people call me Miss Dot. ”
The interior was worse than I’d expected and better than I’d hoped.
Water damage everywhere, structural issues that would need immediate attention, plasterwork that was crumbling faster than it could be preserved.
But the bones. God, the bones were extraordinary.
Twenty-foot ceilings with coffered details that had mostly survived.
An orchestra pit that could be restored.
A stage house with rigging that dated back to the building’s vaudeville days.
“What would it take?” I asked, running my hand along a marble column that had somehow stayed intact. “To bring her back?”
Miss Dot laughed, a rough, knowing sound. “More money than I have, honey. More time than I’ve got left. More stubbornness than any sensible person possesses.”
“I have stubbornness.”
She looked at me then. Really looked, with the sharp assessing gaze of a woman who’d seen enough of life to recognize damage when she met it.
“You running from something?”
“Yes.”
“He hit you?” Miss Dot’s eyes were shrewd, entirely unshockable.
“No. He just-” I paused, trying to find words that were true without being revealing. “He kept things from me. Important things. Things I should have known.”
“Hmm.” Miss Dot walked deeper into the lobby, her heels clicking on the marble. “And you’re here because…?”
“Because I need somewhere to start over. Because I have skills that are going to waste and a life that doesn’t fit anymore and-” I pressed my hand against my stomach again, that unconscious gesture.
“I’m having a baby. In about seven months.
And I want her to grow up somewhere that’s nothing like where I came from. ”
Miss Dot stopped walking.
“Her?”
“Or him. I don’t know yet. But I keep thinking her.”
A long silence. The theater seemed to breathe around us, dust motes swirling in the light from the dirty windows.
“I’ll be buried in the orchestra pit before I sell this place to developers,” Miss Dot said finally.
“They’ve been circling for years. Want to tear her down and put up condos.
” She turned to face me. “But if you’re serious - if you can fix her without destroying what makes her matter - I might be willing to let someone try. ”
“I’m serious.”
“You got references?”
“Not ones I can use.”
Miss Dot smiled. It made her look younger, sharper, like the ghost of the girl she’d been once, fierce and fearless and in love with a building.
“Welcome to Savannah, sugar. Let’s see what you can do.”
***
By the third trimester the Marlowe had a crew, a grant I’d written myself, and a structural engineer named Marcus who’d taken one look at the building’s problems and said “Oh, this is going to be fun” and meant it.
It was unglamorous, honest work that no one could trace to Ferraro money or Jordan connections. It was mine.
The nights were the hard part. I’d lie in the rented rooms above the bakery with both hands on my belly, feeling the small impossible kicks of the person I was about to be responsible for, and the loneliness would come up out of the dark and settle on my chest. I was going to be somebody’s mother.
I’d be doing it a thousand miles from the only man who should have been in the room, who was almost certainly awake in another city hating me, or looking for me, or both.
I did not call him. I want that on the record. However close I came, on however many nights, I did not call him.
The crew built me a ramp without being asked.
It was Marcus who noticed me struggling with the front steps one morning, eight months pregnant, carrying blueprints, trying to manage the awkward geometry of my body against the theater’s ancient entrance.
He didn’t say anything. Just nodded, made a note on his clipboard, and showed up the next day with materials.
“You don’t have to-” I started.
“Boss.” He cut me off, hammer already in hand. “You’re running this project. You need access to the site. This is access.” He shrugged. “Don’t make it weird.”
I watched them work. Marcus and his apprentice and one of the carpenters who’d joined us from another job, and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t even realized was tight.
They weren’t doing this because I was the don’s wife, or the Jordan heir, or anyone with a name that mattered.
They were doing it because I was their boss and I was pregnant and they gave a damn.
It was such a simple thing.
It nearly broke me.
***
Nico came in the spring, on a Tuesday, in the small bright birthing suite of a hospital where nobody knew my name.
The contractions started at dawn while I was arguing with a plaster subcontractor on the phone, and I finished the call before I let myself believe it was happening, because that felt important, to finish the thing I had started.
Then I drove myself halfway to the hospital before Miss Dot caught up, made me pull over, and got behind the wheel herself, muttering about fool girls and their independence the whole way.
There was one of Declan’s men in the hallway. There was always a hallway man. But the room itself was just me, and a midwife named Sylvie with cool hands and an unhurried voice, and fourteen hours of my body doing the one thing no one could do any part of for me.
“Breathe it out, not in,” Sylvie said, somewhere in the worst of it. “You’re doing it. You’re already doing it.”
“I can’t.” It was what I had been telling everyone about everything for a year. “I can’t do this alone.”
“You’re not alone. You’re just doing it without him.” She wiped my face with a cloth. “Those are not the same thing, sugar. Now push.”
So I pushed. Through the wall of it, through the part where I stopped being afraid because there was no room left to be anything but present, and then there was a pressure and a release and a sound that split the room clean in half.