Don’t Call Me Your Donna Anymore

When I was nine months pregnant, the books came to me first.

It arrived the way all dangerous things do in this life — quietly, through a channel meant to look like nothing at all. A skimmed tribute ledger, copied and sent to my private account, the kind of paper that gets men buried in the foundations of buildings they were sworn to protect. My husband, Lorenzo Castellano, capo of his own crew and a made man of the Vitale Family, had been funneling thirty thousand a month to the same woman without fail. The first siphon was dated back two years. Right around the time we lost our first child.

Then, as if someone had been watching the screen over my shoulder, my phone chimed with a message passed through channels. From her.

It was a request to be let in, with a note tucked beneath it like a knife under silk.

'The happy woman who gets thirty thousand in pocket money every month.'

I felt an eerie calm wash over me, almost unnatural — the kind of stillness that settles over a room a half-second before the shooting starts. The grandfather clock in Lorenzo's study ticked somewhere down the hall, patient as a confessor. As I stroked my belly, slow and flat with one palm, I clicked accept.

——

Immediately, a message popped up.

'Did you get the books?'

I ignored it. I went straight to her, to the face she had been bold enough to leave hanging out in the open for anyone in the territory with eyes. The earliest post was from two years ago, the twenty-first of April. In the photograph she leaned gently against a man's shoulder, her hand resting on him the way a woman rests her hand on something she believes is already hers, a massive diamond catching the light off her finger.

The caption read:

'Thank you for the birthday gift, love.'

Only the man's back was visible. I recognized him instantly.

It was Lorenzo. My husband. He was wearing the shirt I had brought him back from the meet in Palermo, the one with the fine embroidery worked into the collar — stitched by hand, chosen by my hand, paid for out of my own family's standing. He had worn another woman's smile in my gift.

Two years ago, the twenty-first of April, was the day I lost our first child. While I lay on a cold table in the Family's safehouse infirmary, the trusted physician working over me in low Italian, my husband — away on Family business, he'd sworn, a sit-down too important to miss — was lifting a glass to celebrate another woman being born into the world.

The irony of it pressed against my throat like a thumb. I did not look away from it. Women of the old bloodlines are not raised to look away.

My hands trembled as I scrolled deeper. Since that day she had been parading her takings, each piece an echo of something I already owned — the same bracelet, the same coat, the same earrings cold against her jaw. Tribute skimmed from the books and turned into trinkets to drape across an outsider's shoulders. A woman from a lesser family, the Brunos, clawing toward a bloodline that had never once lowered its eyes to her. Everything she wore I had worn first.

Everything but one thing.

A jasmine perfume.

Then I reached the post she'd pinned to the top, the one she wanted seen above all the rest. An ultrasound image, grainy and gray. Forged proof of an heir, or real proof of one. Either way, a noose she meant to slip over my husband's neck and call it love. She was pregnant. Or she wanted the whole territory to believe she was.

I dropped the phone into my lap. My heart was a fist beating against the inside of my ribs, against the child who shifted in answer, and I pushed myself up off the couch and went down the hall to the laundry, breath shallow, the silk of my robe whispering against the marble. I dug through the basket until I found the shirt Lorenzo had worn the night before. I lifted it to my face.

Jasmine. Unmistakable. It rose off the collar like a confession he hadn't known he was making.

I never wear perfume. Not once in seven years of this marriage. The men in this life learn a wife's scent the way they learn a rival's footsteps, and I had given him only one to remember.

When I didn't answer her message, the silence began to gnaw at her. She could not stand to be unanswered — outsiders never can, the ones scrabbling at the door of a family that will never open it. My phone buzzed again and again, photographs and short films flooding in, each one another stone dropped onto the scale. I lowered myself back onto the couch and curled one arm beneath the weight of my belly, drawing slow breath against the tightness banding my chest.

I made myself look. All of it. The undeniable evidence laid out like dirt collected for a sit-down. The woman in the photographs was young and lovely, her ponytail swinging with the careless life of someone who has never once paid for anything she's taken. And there, again and again, beside her — Lorenzo. My husband. The capo who had broken the one faith this whole life is built on, the alliance sworn over my family's blood, and who did not yet know that the wife he'd thought too soft to fight back had just stopped blinking, and was smoothing one slow, flat palm across the place where his heir was waiting.