Chapter 19 Naomi
NAOMI
Amalfi is obscenely breathtaking in the way only perfect places can be.
The villa clings to the cliff in blush pink tiers and white columns, bougainvillea tumbling like confetti down staircases that lead to nowhere except better views. And below, the black-hulled yacht gleams like a promise someone intends to keep on camera.
We are in full honeymoon mode, the final push to reassure three different teams—Vecchio’s people, the trust, and a restless fund in New York—that the Dillinger marriage isn’t a stunt with an expiration date, and so we smile while photographers try to catch us unguarded and the sea tries to seduce.
I ignore Harrison’s first four texts because Vasso’s eyes have developed a way of finding my face even when he’s laughing with someone else, and I can’t bear to be read like that right now.
I wait until the yacht reception thins, until Mara corrals a pair of analysts into looking at a prototype of the lighthouse app, and Vasso is drawn into a discussion about carbon-negative supply chains with a man who enjoys hearing himself say “circularity.”
Then I step into the cool of the lower salon and call the number I told myself I wouldn’t.
He picks up on the first ring, which is how I know he’s been waiting to pounce. “Princess.”
“I’m calling to confirm the necklace arrived,” I say, keeping my voice flat. “You have what you wanted. You’ll hold your tongue.”
He laughs softly, a knife on velvet. “A trinket for my silence? Please. You married the housekeeper’s son just to get ahead. Don’t sell me some bullshit about soul mates the way you’re trying so hard to peddle to the tabloids. Ambition clearly runs in the family. Let’s make this useful.”
Feed the monster and it only grows. Hungers for more.
It’s a lesson I forgot. To my cost. “I’m hanging up.”
“You’ll want to hear the request,” he says, and manages to make request sound like extortion with better vowels. “Smooth things over with that upstart husband of yours and get me a position in his company. Optics role. Senior enough to make me respectable.”
I actually do laugh then, because the suggestion is so ridiculous a lesser woman would choke on it. “You want a job from Vasso. The man you sent to the back steps. The man whose father you—”
“Careful,” he croons. “Or I’ll forget I’m speaking to blood.
I don’t care if it’s a fake title. Have your billionaire print you a business card, darling.
Get me in the building. Or I tell every reporter whose number I still own that your marriage is a time-limited merger and the island renaming is a performance piece. ”
“No,” I say, because the word has bones and I need to feel them. “Find someone else to launder you.”
A beat of silence. Then he changes masks; I can hear it in the rearrangement of air. “Very well. Twenty million, and I go away.”
My grip tightens on the rail until the tendons in my wrist sing. “If you call me again, I’m done pretending we share anything except DNA.”
He tsks. “Naomi, Naomi. You were always sentimental. I’ll text the account details.”
I hang up because if I don’t I’ll say something that will have to be forgiven. I turn my phone off because off is the only safe word I have left. Off doesn’t shut my head up. Off doesn’t change the math that says a diamond bought me two days of quiet and a new demand costed like ransom.
Up on the main deck, Naples lights begin to prickle the horizon.
Vasso finds me at the rail with two flutes of something pale and celebratory and sets one in my hand without comment.
He’s changed for dinner—open collar, linen cut to suggest wicked sin, a ring glinting on his thumb, the kind of man a camera will always be a little in love with.
I want to lean into him and let the weight of this day find other shoulders.
I want to shove him, just to feel something else.
“I thought we’d head to Milan after Amalfi,” he says lightly, as if mentioning weather. “My assistant has organized it. Two days. Wedding fittings, logistics. My mother will come if you’d like her to. Eleni will bully the dressmaker for you.”
I stiffen even as something in me snaps like thread pulled once too often. “Why are you bothering?” The words are out before I can sand them. “You could take any heiress who hasn’t wrecked her family name and parade her in tulle. You could get a wife with fewer fractures. You could—”
His eyes sharpen the way a blade does when a whetstone finally hits the right angle. “What exactly are you asking me to confirm, Naomi? That you’re unworthy? That I should have married someone easier? That your self-hatred gets a vote in our logistics?”
“Oh, forgive me for not swooning over ‘our logistics,’” I bite back, heat rising like a flush I can’t scrub off. “Forgive me for not wanting to preen in Milan while your COO drafts org charts and—”
“And what?” he says, too even. “And you send secret texts every time I’m not looking?”
Shock freezes me. And his mouth twists.
“Should I guess who it is or are you going to come clean?”
“Vasso—”
“It can’t be Leo Fucking Goldstein,” he seethes through gritted teeth. “Even you know better than that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He leans in closer, brushes my ear with his lips. “It means you love your grandpa too much to be that foolish, wife. So let me guess the next worst thing. Daddy Dearest?”
That lands. I shouldn’t flinch but I do. “I’m containing him.”
“Containing,” he repeats, and the word sits between us like a covered dish everyone knows is ugly underneath. He looks at me the way you look at a pot you have touched and been burned by. “Is that what we’re calling it this time?”
I lift my chin, willing the heat in my chest to show up as composure and not tears. “He’s loud and he’s vile and unconscionably self-centered, but he’s my father. And…I’m keeping him out of your way.”
“Loud people like audiences,” he says softly on a breath of quiet fury. “They don’t perform to empty halls. If he’s loud now, it’s because someone is listening.”
Before I can craft an answer that doesn’t confess, a PR woman in a coral dress materializes like a benevolent gargoyle and chirps that the chef is ready to present the crudo course and could we please do the toast again at the bow because the last photo caught a waiter in mid-sneeze.
I smile as if my teeth don’t hurt and let Vasso lead me forward because cameras are easier than honesty and I have made a habit of doing the thing I can control when the thing I should do feels fatal.
We perform with terrifying ease that doesn’t feel like a performance any longer. Because what I said on the deck was true. I’m containing my father for my husband because I treasure the latter way more than I do the former.
And it’s an emotion I recognize has just been barely dormant these last ten years, and is now rearing its head with a vengeance.
I love Vasso Dillinger.
Desperately.
I never stopped.
Dinner on the villa terrace later is a stunning watercolor, with candles guttering in glass chimneys and lemon trees giving up their perfume.
We sit with a trustee who rhapsodizes about bird migration, a journalist who will describe my dress as “old-money simple,” and Mara, who is the only person I know who can drink espresso at ten p.m. and then sleep.
I perform wife with finesse and just enough heat to sell headlines, and if my phone vibrates in my evening bag while I’m laughing at something Vasso murmurs, I let it.
Off means off. Off means a reprieve measured in hours.
When we finally retreat to our suite—a white room with a view that makes the moon look like an expensive prop—I go straight to the dressing table and pull open the shallow drawer where I placed the velvet box earlier, the way a penitent checks whether the reliquary is still holding the saint’s finger.
Habit; penance; I don’t know. My hand expects weight.
There isn’t any.
For a second my mind simply… refuses. The drawer is lined in pale suede; the impression from the box is faintly visible, the ghost of what I put there before a day of makeup and microphones and a day pretending I didn’t make a bargain I hate.
The drawer is empty.
The space where the necklace shouldn’t be but where its box should be, where the proof of my lie should have remained hidden until I could make it right—empty.
Behind me, I hear the soft hiss of linen as Vasso shrugs out of his jacket, the catch of a cufflink he removes without looking.
He crosses the room, kisses the hinge of my jaw as if the day hasn’t been chewing mine to bone, and reaches past me for his watch laid on the table.
His gaze follows my hand into the drawer out of simple curiosity, perhaps, or because of the charged stillness I can’t quite mask.
Or, even better and worse, he’s playing his own game.
“What are you looking for?” he asks, mild as a man asking whether I’ve misplaced a comb. But I hear the quiet sonic boom beneath the question.
“The…” My tongue feels enormous in my mouth, clumsy. I swallow and try again. “The box. It isn’t here.”
He frowns, not in suspicion—yet—but in the way of a man remodeling a sentence in his head. “Which box?”
“The necklace,” I say, and hear the small wreck in my voice because there is no way to replace it with poise now. “I— it’s not here.”
The room changes temperature, not dramatically, not enough to make a scene, just enough that the hair at the nape of my neck pays attention. He looks down into the drawer, then at my face, then at the drawer again as if a thing might manifest under the pressure of his gaze.
“Naomi,” he says, and my name in that tone is a closed door and a hand on the knob. “Where could the necklace possibly be?”
My mouth opens. The truth sprints for my teeth and slams into a wall I built with my own hands—a wall called protect him, protect us, protect the deal, protect the life you are trying to have without burning it down to build it.
Behind my ribs something knocks, hard, like a creature trying to get out.
“I—I—” I start, and the word fractures.
Because between those two feeble words, I’ve found the gap between what you mean to say and what you don’t.
And plunged a knife between my own ribs.