Neglected by the Mafia Husband Who Never Chose Her

CHAPTER ONE

Seven Years

The light came through the blinds in stripes across Dante’s chest, and I lay there doing what I’d done most mornings for seven years, which was watching him sleep.

It was a ridiculous habit for a married woman.

I knew that. Wives who had been married as long as I had were supposed to be up by now, making lists, checking their phones, thinking about the day.

Instead I lay on my side with my hand tucked under my cheek and counted the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the way I had since the second year of our marriage, when I’d first understood that I liked looking at him and stopped being embarrassed about it.

He slept the way he did everything else, completely and without apology.

One arm was flung over his head. The sheet had slid down to his waist. His hair, which he kept short and severe for the rest of the world, had gone flat on one side against the pillow and stuck up on the other, and there was a crease across his cheek from the seam of the pillowcase.

Nobody who worked for Dante Moretti had ever seen him like this.

His mother hadn’t seen him like this since he was a boy.

Every morning I got ten minutes of a man who wasn’t guarding anything, and I had never once told him how much I loved those ten minutes, because I suspected that if I did, he’d start waking up earlier.

Outside the window, the bird in the oak tree started up at six fifteen exactly, a harsh two-note call that sounded like a gate that needed oiling.

It had moved into the oak two springs earlier, and Dante had named it Mr. Hinge in the first week and threatened, every morning since, to have it relocated.

He never had. I’d caught him once putting sunflower seeds on the terrace railing.

Dante woke all at once, the way he always did. His breathing changed, and his eyes opened, and his hand found my hip under the sheet before he’d even turned his head.

“You’re staring,” he said. His voice was rough with sleep.

“I’m allowed.”

“Seven years, and you still look at me like you’re checking I’m real.”

“Maybe I’m checking whether you’re going to shave today. You’ve got a cheek full of pillowcase.”

He rubbed his face, felt the crease, and made a disgusted sound that made me laugh.

Then he rolled toward me and pulled me in against him, warm and heavy, and kissed my shoulder, then my collarbone, then the hinge of my jaw.

It was the same order every time. I’d never asked whether he knew he did it.

I didn’t want to find out that he did, and I didn’t want to find out that he didn’t.

“Mr. Hinge is loud today,” he murmured against my neck.

“He’s excited. It’s Wednesday.”

“What’s special about Wednesday?”

“Nothing. That’s why he’s excited. He’s easily pleased.”

“That’s one of us.” His hand moved slowly along my side. “Marco’s calling about the Red Hook shipment at seven.”

“That’s forty-three minutes.”

“You counted.”

“I always count.”

He laughed, low, and kissed me properly, and for a while the morning narrowed down to his mouth and his hands and the unhurried way he had with me after seven years, the way he still paid attention to my face as if he expected to learn something new there.

Mr. Hinge kept up his racket outside. Neither of us minded.

Afterward I lay with my head on his shoulder and my leg hooked over his, and he traced idle circles on my back with two fingers.

“Two weeks from Thursday,” I said.

“I know what’s two weeks from Thursday.”

“Do you.”

“Tavola. The corner table by the window. Eight o’clock.” He tipped my chin up so I had to look at him. “You booked it in January. You told me in January, and again in March, and you put it on my calendar in red, which Paula noticed, because Paula notices everything that goes on my calendar in red.”

“I wanted to be sure.”

“I’m sure.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ve already told Paula nobody schedules anything that night. Not my father. Not the Pope.”

“The Pope doesn’t call you.”

“He’d have to go through Paula.”

I laughed into his shoulder, and I believed him completely, because in seven years he had forgotten exactly one important date, my twenty-fifth birthday, and he had been so horrified afterward that he’d never forgotten one since.

We lay there longer than we should have.

He told me about his uncle Sal at dinner the night before, trying to explain cryptocurrency to Dante’s father and calling it “crypto-currency, like a crypt,” and he did the voice, the slow gravel of it, and the hand gestures, and I laughed until I had to cover my mouth.

Most people found Dante intimidating. They didn’t know he could do his whole family, one by one, down to the way his aunt Carmela held her wineglass by the bowl.

“Did you see the Memling?” I asked. “In the Sunday paper. The Met’s lending it to Bruges for the anniversary show.”

“The one with the man holding the coin?”

“The one with the man holding the coin.” I was pleased he’d remembered. I’d shown it to him years ago in one of my old textbooks. “I wrote my junior thesis on that painting. My professor told me I had the best eye she’d seen in ten years.”

“Dr. Fenwick.”

“You remember her name?”

“You’ve mentioned her maybe four times. I pay attention.” He stroked my hair. “You could go. To Bruges. See it.”

“Maybe.” It was the answer I always gave.

I’d said maybe to a lot of things over the years.

The docent training at the museum, which I’d done for a year before the foundation dinners got too big for Elena to run alone.

The continuing education course at Columbia that I’d bookmarked three separate times.

Maybe was easier than explaining that there was always a birthday, a dinner, a family thing that needed me that week.

“You say maybe every time,” Dante said.

“Because there’s always something.”

“There’s always something because you’re the one who handles it.” He said it lightly, fondly, as a kind of compliment, and I took it as one.

* * *

Downstairs, he made the coffee himself, as he did every morning, even though Ines had been hired eight years ago partly to make coffee and had given up trying to stop him.

He used the old stovetop pot his grandmother had brought from Palermo, and he stood at the burner in his undershirt with his reading glasses pushed up on his head, waiting for it to hiss, a man who owned half the waterfront in Red Hook frowning seriously at a four-dollar kettle.

“You’re going to be late for Marco,” I said.

“Marco can wait for my coffee.”

He brought mine over without asking how I wanted it. Half a spoon of sugar and a splash of milk heated in a pan, never the microwave, because he’d decided in our first year that the microwave did something to it. I’d never told him I couldn’t taste the difference. It seemed unkind.

I read the paper. He read something on his phone.

It was ordinary. We’d done it thousands of times.

I could have drawn the kitchen at that hour with my eyes closed: the light on the copper pans, Ines humming in the pantry, the weight of Dante’s foot against mine under the table, which he did without looking up, a small point of contact he seemed to need.

I noticed when his face changed. The crease appeared between his eyebrows, the one that meant business and not bad news, and then it deepened into something else, and he set his phone down very carefully, screen down, the way he did when he had already decided something and was working out how to tell me.

“What is it?”

“Alessandra’s coming home.”

I knew the name. Everyone who’d sat at a Moretti table knew the name.

Alessandra Romano had grown up two houses down from Dante on the same private road in Rye, and they had been inseparable as children, and every adult in both families had started planning their wedding somewhere around the time they learned to ride bicycles.

It hadn’t happened. She had married a man from Boston instead, a developer named Marcus Grieco, and I’d met her exactly twice, at crowded events where we’d exchanged a few pleasant sentences about the weather and the canapés.

“Visiting?” I asked.

“Her husband’s dead. Six weeks ago. It turns out he owed money to people who don’t forgive debts because a man dies.” His jaw set. “They’ve been to her house in Boston twice. They know she has a daughter. She called my father last night, and my father called me.”

“Oh, Dante. That’s terrible.” I meant it. I put my hand over his on the table. “Of course we should help. Is she going to the Greenwich house? Grant could set up the detail there, and we could have Ines’s sister go up and open it...”

“She’s coming here.”

I took my hand back slowly, without quite meaning to. “Here. To this house.”

“It’s the most secure property we have. Full perimeter. Grant’s best people. Staff who’ve been vetted for ten years.” He said it the way he said all family business, flat and final, a matter already weighed and decided. “I had the east wing opened up last night. Ines is airing it out this morning.”

I looked toward the pantry. Ines had stopped humming.

“Last night,” I said.

“She called at eleven. You were asleep.”

“I woke up when you came to bed. You could have told me then.”

“It was one in the morning. You were half asleep. I wasn’t going to start a conversation about Alessandra at one in the morning.”

“So you started the east wing instead.”

He looked at me with the particular frown he wore when a contract didn’t read the way he expected. There was no defensiveness in it, only confusion. “Vivienne. She’s family. Her little girl is eight years old and somebody has been watching her school. What was there to discuss?”

“Whether I might have an opinion. Whether I get a say in who lives in my home.”

“Of course you get a say. It’s your home.” He said it as though saying it made it so, as though the words themselves settled the question. “If you’re not comfortable with it, tell me. I’ll call my father and we’ll put her somewhere else.”