Chapter 15
fifteen
Vincenzo
Iknow the exact moment dinner is about to become unbearable.
It’s always quiet at first. Arabella and I are halfway through the second course in the smaller dining room since there’s no reason to entertain tonight. A quartet hums softly from hidden speakers because Arabella likes music with dinner when she’s trying to feel civilized.
The food is excellent, the wine is old, and the table is set for intimacy by people who still insist on pretending that marriage automatically makes a room romantic.
It does not.
My wife sits across from me in silk the color of cream, her dark hair pinned up loosely, and diamonds at her ears. She is beautiful in the exact way she has always been; sharp and composed, and too elegant for anyone to mistake her for soft.
I respect her—I have always respected her, but I have never once wanted her.
We have made a decent life out of that arrangement by our standards.
A political union with an understanding.
Public affection where needed, private distance where possible.
It’s worked because both of us are too pragmatic to demand fairytales from a contract written in other people’s interests.
I know her signs now. The way she stirs her wine instead of drinking it, and how her eyes drift toward one of the empty seats next to her. The way she keeps waiting for me to speak first when she knows I won’t.
So, when she says, “We should talk about children again,” I don’t even bother pretending to be blindsided.
I set my wine glass down carefully and look at her. “Again.”
“Yes, Vincenzo. Again.”
Her words come out brittle, and I can hear the tension underneath. Which means this has been turning over in her mind for a while before she chose tonight to lay it at the table between us.
I should have seen it coming when one of the society wives announced her third pregnancy last week.
Another brought a newborn to a charity luncheon Arabella hosted and spent the entire afternoon being congratulated.
Our world is cruel to women in polished little ways that men often pretend not to notice because cruelty comes gift-wrapped in etiquette.
“We’ve discussed this—”
“We’ve avoided it,” she cuts in, and I almost smile at the accurate phrasing.
We have avoided it. Deliberately and efficiently. The same way we avoid discussing what she does on nights she does not come home until past midnight. The same way I avoid telling her where my mind goes when I wake from dreams already half in mourning.
There are many things that keep a marriage functional if both people never drag them directly into the light.
“Arabella,” I say, and my own voice is even enough to irritate me. “We’ve tried everything. You know the outcome will be the same.”
I know the second the words leave my mouth, I’ve spoken too bluntly, but bluntness is the only form of honesty I’ve ever trusted. Softer men might have found a gentler language, but I am not a soft man.
Her fingers tighten around the stem of her wineglass. “You could say it less clinically.”
“Would that change anything?”
“No,” she says, and her mouth trembles. “But it might make me feel less defective over the second course.”
There it is—the wound itself finally spoken plainly. I lean back in my chair and drag a hand over my mouth because the conversation has shifted from irritating to exhausting in under a minute. I do not have the required patience for either mood.
“You’re not defective,” I say.
She lets out a low and humorless laugh. “Please don’t insult me by lying politely.”
“I am not lying,” I say. “I am saying that biology is not morality.”
“No,” she says, and the bitterness is fully awake in her. “In our world, it’s optics.”
That, unfortunately, is true.
“I can’t give you a son,” she says, her voice wet now. “I can’t give you any child at all, and every woman I know seems to have managed it by now without the need for medical intervention.”
There are a hundred better things I could say in this moment—kinder ones, gentler ones. Instead, I ask, “Why now?”
Her face changes immediately as her careful control fractures. “What do you mean, why now?”
“I mean,” I say, keeping my voice flat because something in me resents being dragged into emotional territory I never agreed to cross, “why are you asking this tonight specifically? Instead of last month, or six months ago, or even the year before? What’s changed?”
Her expression shifts all at once, composure cracking so quickly it almost looks theatrical if you don’t know her better.
Arabella doesn’t cry prettily; she never has.
The tears come furious, humiliating her even as they fall, and that makes the whole thing somehow worse because she hates vulnerability with almost as much discipline as I do.
She lifts a hand to her face, then drops it when she realizes there is no point salvaging elegance from this.
“Because I am tired of being the wife people feel sorry for. I’m tired of sitting in rooms full of women who have nurseries and names picked out and stupid little knitted things from grandmothers and mothers and everyone else who assumes that’s how life goes.
I’m tired of seeing the way people look at me and knowing exactly what they’re thinking. ”
The silence after that is not empty. It’s full of things I don’t say.
I could tell her that a son isn’t something I’ve been pining for in private. That legacy in our world is a curse dressed as privilege, and every male heir is just another child handed a polished knife and told to smile for the cameras until he’s old enough to use it.
I could tell her that I don’t lie awake at night yearning for a little boy with my eyes and my last name. I could tell her that, if anything, the thought of creating another child for families like ours to ruin makes something in me go cold.
But that would be honesty, and honesty has never done either of us any favors.
So, I say nothing, and unfortunately, silence has always been one of the few languages Arabella speaks fluently.
She sees the absence in my face; the emptiness sitting where concern should be. She sees that I’m not moved by the tears, not because I’m trying to punish her, but because something in me simply fails to rise to meet her pain. The realization lands on her face before she even speaks it.
“You feel nothing,” she says. Her voice is small, wrecked, and almost disbelieving. I look at her and fail to lie convincingly enough to save her from it.
Arabella laughs once, a horrible, wet little sound.
“Of course you don’t.” She pushes her chair back so hard it scrapes against the floor and rises too quickly, the silk of her dress whispering around her legs.
“God, I knew it. I always knew it, but seeing it…” Her hand presses hard to her mouth again, then drops as she stares at me like I’ve transformed in front of her into something uglier than she expected. “You’re a monster.”
The words should sting, but they don’t. Perhaps because they’re not entirely inaccurate. Perhaps because I’ve been called worse by men who knew me less well. Perhaps because part of me has always suspected the title fits better than husband ever did.
She waits, maybe for denial, maybe for apology, maybe for proof that she’s wrong. I offer none of those.
That, more than anything, seems to make up her mind for her. She turns and storms out of the dining room, tears and silk and outrage trailing behind her like a ripped veil. A second later, I hear her heels striking the marble of the corridor outside hard enough to sound like punctuation.
I sit there with the candlelight and the untouched third course and let out a quiet sigh because the whole thing feels painfully inevitable. She knew what she signed up for. That sounds cruel, even in my own head, but cruelty and truth have always been overly intimate companions.
Arabella married me for the same reason I married her: politics, structure, protection, and mutually beneficial presentation. We did not walk into this blind. She knew I would be useful, reliable, and respectful. She also knew I was not built for devotion in the conventional sense.
If she expected warmth to bloom out of this arrangement simply because enough time had passed, that was optimism neither of us had any business entertaining.
Still, I know I should have handled it better. The fact that I didn’t bother is perhaps the ugliest part. I’m not stone, that would imply dignity. I’m something messier. A man with the wrong softness in the wrong places and nothing at all where a wife would reasonably want them.
I finish dinner alone.
The next night, I apologize.
This, too, feels like choreography, but at least it is honest in its own limited way. The gala we’re attending is hers, one of the larger charity events on the winter calendar, full of old money, public generosity, and women who like being photographed alongside expensive causes.
Arabella is seated at her vanity when I walk into her dressing room with the velvet case in my hand. Her makeup is half done. Her hair is being pinned into place by one of the stylists. The silver dress spread over the chaise is mercilessly flattering.
She sees me in the mirror and goes immediately into careful mode. Good. That makes two of us.
“I was unpleasant,” I say.
One of her brows lifts faintly because there is no point pretending that narrows the field. “You usually are.”
“Last night in particular.”
That earns me more of her attention. The stylists go still in the room, all of them well-trained enough not to look as if they’re listening while plainly hearing every syllable.
I set the velvet case on the vanity and open it.
The necklace inside is worth ten million and then some, diamonds and sapphires cut to catch light like spilled water over ice. The sort of obscene piece only men with something to apologize for or prove ever really buy.