I stood in the quiet that followed, listening to the engine of his car roar to life and tear down the street.
I shook my head. For a man who commanded fear and respect across an entire territory, Giordano Valente could be remarkably childish.
He was gone for several days without coming home.
The estate settled into a familiar silence, the kind that crept through the hallways like fog off the harbor. Another cold war. If this had been before, I would have been a wreck. I would have paced the marble floors of our bedroom at three in the morning, replaying every insignificant detail with surgical precision. Had I raised my voice when he came in late? Had I stirred in bed and disturbed his few hours of sleep? Had the dinner I'd asked the kitchen to prepare not been to his liking? Had I pushed too hard about the hours he kept, the calls he took in the other room with the door locked?
I would have drowned in it. The self-doubt. The endless second-guessing. Turning myself inside out to find whatever flaw had driven him away again.
But now, I actually enjoyed the peace while Giordano was away.
The house breathed differently without him in it. The guards at the gate relaxed their posture by a fraction. The housekeeper hummed while she worked. Even the light seemed to fall more gently through the tall windows of the sitting room, as though the walls themselves were grateful for the reprieve.
Seeing him from outside that toxic loop, with the clarity that distance and heartbreak had purchased at a price I was still paying, Giordano seemed like a man with serious problems he refused to name. Quick to anger. Quicker to diminish. He carried himself like a sermon waiting to be delivered, always correcting, always positioning himself above, always certain that his way was the only way the world could turn.
I used to rush back from every errand, every outing, terrified that Gio would return to the estate and find me missing. That he would read absence as disloyalty. That his jaw would set in that particular way, and the evening would curdle into silence so thick it pressed against my chest like a hand.
All that fear and worry now felt pointless. Every anxious concession, every swallowed word, every time I had rearranged myself to fit the shape of his expectations. All it ever did was make me feel marginally better in the moment, while Gio grew more annoyed, as though my effort itself was an irritation, a reminder that he owed me something he had no intention of giving.
Without his constraints, I threw myself into something that was entirely mine.
I had been building a legitimate venture for months. A high-end Italian restaurant concept, the kind of place where old-world recipes met modern elegance, where the wine list told a story and every table felt like a private room. My contact in Chicago real estate had brought me a promising opportunity: a historic brownstone in a prime neighborhood, the kind of property that came along once in a decade. If I handled the acquisition and the buildout well, my partner said the returns would double our initial projections, and there would be significant opportunities to expand into a second and third location.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt something close to excitement that had nothing to do with the Valente name.
I stayed up late at the kitchen table with my laptop open, running market research, comparing comparable properties, studying the dining landscape in every neighborhood within a twenty-block radius. I made calls during the day and refined projections at night. The work consumed me in the best possible way, filling the hours that used to be hollowed out by waiting.
By the time the initial phase was wrapped up, the proposal polished and the offer submitted, I realized I hadn't contacted Giordano at all.
Not once. Not a single call, not a single message on the burner phone he kept for family use.
I didn't even have to guess where he was.
I found Chiara Soriano's social media. She still maintained one, which was either reckless or deliberate, and I suspected the latter. Her posts were artfully composed, dripping with melancholy and literary pretension. Moody photographs of rain-streaked windows and half-empty wine glasses, accompanied by lines that read like the poetry of a woman who wanted desperately to be perceived as deep.
It struck me as embarrassingly affected. We were long past that stage of life, the stage where longing was romantic instead of just destructive.
But Giordano seemed to eat it up.
I saw a post from her that read: I really envy her for meeting someone as amazing as you are so early. If, and I mean if, you'd met me even a minute sooner, would you have chosen to love me?
No surprise. Giordano had replied.
Yes.
The word sat on the screen like a bullet casing on a clean floor. Small. Final. Evidence of something that could not be taken back.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I closed the phone, set it face down on the table, and went back to my projections for Chicago.
