2. Kylie #2
Bianca’s hand paused on the pot. “Right. Of course.” She turned to me with that same sweet smile. “I’m still learning. Lucky you’re here to remind me.”
Every offense was deniable.
The rerouted menus: I just thought we might try something lighter, since Giovanni’s been so stressed.
The adjusted schedule: He seems calmer with some buffer time built in.
The way she started appearing in his study doorway at all hours, asking questions about accounts and shipments and personnel matters that were none of her business.
She’s eager to help, Giovanni said when I mentioned it. After everything she’s been through, can you blame her?
I couldn’t. That was the worst part. I couldn’t blame a grieving woman for wanting to feel useful, couldn’t fault her for trying to integrate into the family that had taken her in. Every time I felt the edges of anger, it dissolved into guilt, who was I to begrudge an orphan a place at the table?
But I watched her watching my husband. I saw the way her eyes tracked him across rooms, the way she engineered proximity, the way she learned his habits and rhythms with the intensity of someone memorizing a map.
Giovanni saw none of it. To him, Bianca was a debt paid. A kindness owed to a dead man’s memory. He looked at her and saw a child he’d known at family dinners, a girl who’d lost her father too young, a responsibility he’d inherited along with the rest of his empire.
He didn’t see the way she looked back.
***
The memory came at night, as the worst ones always do.
Year two of our marriage. The first year had been all negotiation, two strangers learning to share space, share meals, share a bed without quite sharing themselves.
We’d been careful with each other. Polite.
The kind of married couple who remembered birthdays and anniversaries but couldn’t quite figure out what to say in between.
But something had started to shift. I’d catch him watching me sometimes, this look on his face like he was solving a puzzle he didn’t quite understand.
He’d started leaving books on my nightstand, not for annotation anymore, just because he thought I’d like them.
He’d started touching me more often, casually, like his hands forgot they weren’t supposed to land on the small of my back when we walked through doorways.
That night, the room was dark and his hand was in mine.
I’d been working up the nerve for weeks.
Rehearsing in my head, feeling ridiculous, feeling terrified, feeling like a teenager with her first crush instead of a grown woman in a marriage she’d never chosen.
But somewhere along the way, the arranged had become something else.
Somewhere along the way, I’d started wanting him, not the alliance, not the security, him.
His brain and his body and the way he looked at me like I was the only interesting thing in any room.
“Giovanni?”
“Mm.” He didn’t look up from his phone.
“I love you.”
The words were barely above a whisper. Three syllables that cost me everything, three years of telling myself this was just business, just duty, just the price of peace between two families who’d been killing each other for decades.
He squeezed my fingers. His grip tightened, just for a second, like I’d said something that mattered.
Then silence.
I stayed there in the dark and waited. Seconds passed, then a minute, then another.
He didn’t say it back.
I felt the silence settle over the marriage like a tarp over furniture, a covering. A protection. Something to keep the dust off the things nobody used anymore.
I never said it again. Neither did he.
***
That night, the night of the memory, two weeks into Bianca’s residence in my home, I reached for my husband.
We were in bed, the same bed where I’d laid myself bare and gotten nothing back.
Giovanni was on his side, back to me, breathing slow and even.
He might have been asleep. Or awake and pretending, the same way I pretended not to notice when he got home at midnight and kissed my hair like a benediction.
I touched his shoulder. Let my hand rest there, feeling the heat of him through his t-shirt.
He didn’t stir.
I moved closer. Pressed my body against his back, my forehead between his shoulder blades. The way I used to do, before everything got quiet. Before the silence became its own language.
Nothing. He gave no sign at all that he felt me there.
I stayed anyway. Eyes open in the dark, watching the shadows on the wall, feeling the distance between us as something with weight and edges.
He was right there, right there, close enough to touch, near enough to count his heartbeats if I pressed my ear to his spine, and he might as well have been on another continent.
Eventually, I turned over. Put my back to his back. Stared at the empty side of the bed that would be my view when I woke up in the morning.
He’s just tired, I told myself. He’s got a lot on his mind. The family, the business, the Albanians causing problems, Bianca settling in-
Bianca.
Even in my own head, her name felt like an intrusion.
I got up to use the bathroom around 2 a.m., and on my way back to bed, I saw her.
The hallway was dark except for the security lights that glowed at ankle-level, and she was moving through it like a ghost in a silk robe. Going from somewhere to somewhere, quiet enough that I wouldn’t have heard her if I’d been asleep.
She stopped when she saw me.
For a moment, we just looked at each other. Two women in the dark, one married to the man of the house and one… what? A guest? A charity case? A threat?
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. Her voice was soft. Pitched for intimacy, for shared secrets, for the kind of conversation women had when the men weren’t listening. “This house is so quiet. I’m still getting used to it.”
“You’ll adjust.”
“I’m sure I will.” She tilted her head, studying me with those dark eyes that reflected the security lights like coins in a fountain. “He talks about you, you know. Giovanni. More than you’d think.”
I didn’t take the bait. “Goodnight, Bianca.”
“He’s easier to take care of than people think.”
I stopped. Turned back. She was still standing there, still watching me, and the smile on her face was the same sweet butter-wouldn’t-melt expression she’d worn since she walked through our front door.
“You just have to actually pay attention.”
The words landed quiet, and left a mark anyway.
I walked back to my bedroom without responding. I climbed into bed beside my husband, who hadn’t moved, who hadn’t noticed I was gone.
And I lay there until morning, trying to convince myself I’d imagined the threat in her voice.