16. Laney
LANEY
The man had been outside for three days.
He stood across the street from the building, smoking through a pack every afternoon.
I saw him from the window when I walked Sofia to the corner for bread, when I came back from the university library, when I opened the shutters at dawn because I couldn't sleep.
He never looked up, but he didn't need to.
The way he leaned against the lamppost, the expensive cut of his jacket, the bored patience in the way he lit one cigarette after another — I understood what he was.
Massimo's.
The word made my stomach drop. Not the police, not some random man who happened to like that particular stretch of sidewalk.
One of theirs, stationed there to watch, to report back, to make sure I knew I wasn't as free as I thought I was.
I'd spent ten years learning to read the signs, learning which men in a room were family and which were just business. I hated that I was still good at it.
I kept Sofia close after that. No more walks to the fountain, no more gelato at the place she liked near the Pantheon.
She asked why we couldn't go out, and I told her Rome was busy this time of year.
She looked at me like I was lying, which I was, and went back to her coloring book without another word.
She was too smart for ten. It terrified me.
Massimo called at all hours.
Two in the morning. Four. Six, when I was making Sofia breakfast and had to silence the phone before she heard his name on the screen. I didn't answer, and he didn't leave messages. Just the calls, over and over, like he thought wearing me down was a strategy that would work.
It was exactly what his mother would do.
God, was he becoming them? I sat on the edge of the narrow bed in the apartment Professor Benedetti had helped me find and stared at the phone in my hand.
The thought made my chest go tight. Massimo had always been the reasonable one, the one who kept his head when his brother lost his, the one who smiled at his mother's manipulations and then did what he wanted anyway.
But reasonable men didn't send someone to watch their wife's building.
Reasonable men didn't call at four in the morning and hang up without speaking.
I set the phone down and pressed my palms against my knees until my hands stopped shaking. I wanted to believe he was different. I'd spent ten years telling myself the Lombardo in him was just a name, just an inheritance he'd never claimed. But the man outside said otherwise.
Maybe I'd been wrong the whole time.
When Rosaria called, I almost didn't pick up. But Rosaria wasn't Massimo, and I still had enough respect for her to answer.
"Laney." Her voice was careful, like she was stepping around glass. "I wanted you to hear it from me."
"Hear what?"
"The petition has been filed with the Church."
I didn't say anything. The words sat in my head, heavy and wrong, but I couldn't make them mean something real.
"Laney?"
"I'm here."
"I'm sorry," Rosaria said quietly, and hung up.
I sat with the phone in my lap for a long time after that.
Sofia was singing to herself in the other room, some song about a bird she'd learned at school.
The sunlight came through the window in dusty slats.
It was such an ordinary moment, and I thought maybe that was what the end of a marriage looked like — not a fight or a door slamming, just a phone call and your daughter singing in the next room.
I should have felt something bigger. Rage, maybe, or grief sharp enough to double me over. But I just felt tired.
When Costanza called two days later, I knew better than to answer. But I did it anyway, because some part of me still wanted to hear what she would say. Some part of me was still stupid enough to think she might surprise me.
"You need to step aside," she said, not even bothering with my name.
"Step aside from what?"
"From this fantasy that you have any claim left." Her voice was clipped, satisfied. "You had your chance, Laney. You chose to leave. Now let the rest of us get on with our lives."
I wanted to say something sharp, something that would land, but my throat closed up and I just ended the call. My hands were shaking again, and I hated that. I hated that she could still do that to me.
I didn't cry, though. Not where Sofia could hear.
The doctor's office was across the river, tucked between a pharmacy and a shop that sold religious medals.
I'd gone in because I couldn't stop being tired, because I kept getting dizzy in the library stacks, because my body felt like it belonged to someone else.
The doctor was a middle-aged woman with kind eyes and no-nonsense hands, and she told me in clear, unaccented English that I was pregnant.
"About six weeks," she said, looking at her notes.
I sat there on the exam table with the paper crinkling under me and tried to do the math. Six weeks. That put it right at the night I came home from Rome. The night I found Vittoria's scarf in our rooms and Massimo and I came together anyway, trying to get back to something we'd lost.
Of course. Of course it did.
"Do you have questions?" the doctor asked.
I gave a small shake of my head. I didn't have questions, I had a daughter in a borrowed apartment and a husband who was having our marriage annulled and a man outside my building who worked for people I used to think I understood.
I had no career, no money of my own, no plan past getting through the week. But I didn't have questions.
"You'll want to schedule a follow-up," she said gently, handing me a card. "There are options, if you need to discuss them. You don't have to decide anything today."
Options. Like whether to keep it, whether to tell Massimo, whether to let this one thing tie me to him forever even after the Church said we'd never been married at all. I took the card and shoved it in my pocket.
"Thank you," I said.
My hands were steadier than I expected.
I decided to keep the child on the walk back to the apartment.
It wasn't a dramatic decision, nothing like the ones I'd read about in books where a woman weighs her whole life in a moment and comes out transformed.
I just knew I was going to do it, the same way I knew I wasn't going back to Sicily, the same way I'd known ten years ago that I loved Massimo enough to give up everything I'd worked for.
Some decisions you don't argue with. You just make them and see what happens after.
I stopped on the bridge and looked down at the river, at the way the light hit the water and turned it gold.
A child. Another daughter, maybe, or a son with Massimo's eyes and his mother's ruthlessness and no idea his parents' marriage had been erased before he was born.
The thought should have scared me more than it did.
Maybe I just wanted one thing that was mine, that nobody could take from me or erase with a petition to the Church.
I didn't tell anyone.
Not Nate, who called every few days to check on me and still thought I'd left because Massimo didn't value my work.
Not Professor Benedetti, who had gone out of his way to make space for me in the department and deserved honesty more than most. Not Sofia, obviously, who was too young to carry something like that.
I kept it to myself, this one piece of information that was mine and only mine, and for the first time in weeks I felt like I could breathe.
It was the only secret I'd ever kept that didn't make me feel smaller.
Professor Benedetti called me into his office. I'd been working in the library, and when his secretary found me I thought I'd done something wrong. Taken a book I shouldn't have, maybe, or overstayed my borrowed welcome.
But when I got to his office he was smiling.
"We'd like to bring you on," he said, tapping a folder on his desk.
"Not a permanent position yet, but a research associate appointment for the next two years, renewable depending on funding.
You'll have office space, library access, a small stipend.
It's not what you deserve, Laney, but it's a start. "
I fixed my gaze on him. "A start," I repeated stupidly, like I didn't understand the words.
He smiled. "Your work on the Lombardo site is extraordinary, even if they never appreciated it. We do. Say yes before I change my mind."
"Yes," I said. My voice cracked, but I got it out. "Yes. Thank you."
When I left his office I stood in the hallway for a minute with my back against the wall and my hand pressed over my mouth, trying not to fall apart in front of the graduate students walking past. It wasn't a triumph, not remotely — it was a scrap, a handhold, the smallest possible opening.
But it was mine, and it had my name on it, and that was enough to make my throat go tight with something that felt dangerously close to hope.
I walked back to the apartment in the heat of the afternoon and let myself cry for the first time in weeks, just a little, where nobody could see.
Rosaria called again.
"It's done," she said. No preamble, no apology in her voice this time. Just fact. "The marriage is dissolved. The wedding is set."
I looked at the calendar tacked to the wall above the table where Sofia did her homework. That gave them until then to erase ten years, to turn me into a woman who had never been a Lombardo at all, to slot Vittoria into the place I'd left empty.
"Laney, are you there?"
"I'm here," I said. "Thank you for telling me."
"I wish—" She stopped. Whatever she wished, she didn't finish it. "Take care of yourself."
She hung up, and I set the phone down very carefully, like it might break.
The marriage was over. I knew that. I'd known it since the night I walked out of the palazzo with Sofia walking beside me, her hand in mine, since the night I told Massimo to let it end and he didn't stop me.
But knowing it and hearing it were different things, and sitting alone in a borrowed apartment in Rome with my hand resting on my stomach where a child I hadn't told anyone about was growing — that was different too.
I thought about calling him. Just once, just to hear his voice, just to see if he'd answer the way I hadn't answered him. But I didn't. I sat there with the phone in my hand and the sunlight coming through the window, and I didn't call.
It felt like the first honest thing I'd done in years.
Nate came by with takeout and a concern that was so transparent it was almost funny. He set the bags on the counter and looked at me like I was a dig site he was trying to read.
"You're too thin," he said.
"I'm fine."
"Laney."
I pulled plates out of the cabinet and didn't look at him. "I'm fine, Nate. Really."
He was quiet for a minute, unpacking containers of pasta and bread, and then he said, "I could stay, you know. Postpone the fieldwork. You shouldn't be alone right now."
The offer sat between us, genuine and completely impossible.
Nate meant it — he'd give up the fieldwork, the survey work he'd been talking about for months, the chance to get his name on something that mattered, just to make sure I was all right.
And I loved him for it, the same uncomplicated way I'd loved him since we were both grad students with dirt under our nails and no idea what we were doing.
But I couldn't let him stay. Not when Massimo was already asking questions about Rome, not when there was a man outside my building, not when I was carrying a child I hadn't told anyone about and didn't plan to.
Nate staying would be one more thing I'd have to explain, one more piece of my life I'd have to justify, and I was so tired of justifying anything to anyone.
And maybe I needed to do this alone. Maybe that was the point.
"Go," I said. I made myself smile at him. "I'll be fine. Sofia and I will be fine."
He searched my face for a long moment, and I thought he might push, might make me admit I was in over my head. But he just nodded, slow and uncertain.
"Call me if you need anything," he said. "I mean it, Laney. Anything."
"I will."
He didn't believe me. I didn't believe me either. But he left two days later, and I stood at the window with Sofia beside me, watching the street below. The man who'd been outside our building was still there.