Every flicker of Gioia's expression, every pout, every flash of temper, even the simple gesture of tucking back her hair, Lorenzo had captured it all in his lens.
After we married, he never touched a camera again.
Once I asked him to take a portrait of me, swollen with child, and he claimed the camera was lost, then turned around and referred me to some famous photographer the Family kept on retainer.
It was never lost. His lens simply had room for only one person, the woman he loved.
My eyes were dry, wrung out, unable to spill a single tear. I quietly put the album back where I'd found it, sliding it behind the cistern the way a soldier hides a piece he doesn't want found.
On my phone I bought passage out of the country, somewhere the Falcone reach thinned to nothing, then drafted the papers to dissolve our blood union.
If he loved Gioia this much, I would set him free.
The next morning, my eyes were swollen like walnuts.
Lorenzo fretted over me, made me a breakfast with his own hands, then boiled eggs and peeled them carefully, pressing them to my lids to bring the swelling down. A tailor's hands, precise, gentle, the same hands that signed away men's lives over espresso.
The tender, attentive picture he made almost had me doubting whether last night had been a dream.
But the hollow flatness of my belly reminded me. All of it was real.
Seeing that I hadn't touched a bite, he sighed:
"Adriana, our baby is gone. I know you're hurting, and it breaks my heart too. But you have to take care of yourself. You've lost so many these past years, your body is already so weak. Eat a little more. Don't make me worry, all right?"
"Where is the baby's body? I want to see him."
Three months. My baby would have taken shape by now, but he would never get the chance to come into this world.
And the answer I got was the same as the last seven times:
"I've already had the baby properly laid to rest. You're in a bad way right now. I was afraid seeing him would only break your heart."
He ran his thumb along the inside seam of his cuff as he said it, the way he checked a stitch, smoothing over the lie until it lay flat.
"Mamma and the old Don heard you lost another. They're devastated. We'll go back to the compound for dinner tonight, and pay our respects while we're there."
The moment we stepped through the gates of the old compound, soldiers straightening at the sight of him, I saw Gioia draped on my mother-in-law's arm, cooing and playing the darling.
When she spotted me, she thrust her belly out higher, one hand resting low and possessive over it, almost showing it off:
"Oh, Adriana, you came? Long time no see. Sit down, sit. I heard you lost another one, you mustn't tire yourself out."
Ever since the wedding, things between me and Matteo and Gioia had been beyond repair. Whenever I came to the compound, I made sure to pick times they wouldn't be there.
I never imagined I'd run into them today.
I looked at her six-month belly, and the thought that this was Lorenzo's child sent a stab through my chest.
He had never once let the child in my womb live past three months.
The instant she saw me, Margherita's face darkened. The black rosary at her wrist began to click, bead by bead:
"Useless waste, can't even keep a baby in her belly. How many times is this now? And you've got the nerve to talk about being tired? How did my son end up saddled with a thing like you?"
She was Lorenzo's birth mother, yet only Matteo's step-grandmother, and just fifty this year.
Watching the seat of the Don that should have gone to her own son get snatched away by Matteo, how could she not be bitter?
Once upon a time Lorenzo would have spoken up for me, but right now his eyes held only Gioia, brimming with longing and besotted devotion. He didn't hear a word anyone said. The room had gone quiet around his stillness, the way it always did, and no one dared fill the silence.
"Nonna, please don't be angry. Adriana just isn't fated with the blessing of motherhood, that's all. She's lost so many babies, it's not as if she wanted to."
Margherita gave a cold snort, the beads falling still in her fingers:
"A jinx, that's all she is. Nothing but a drag on my son."
Gioia made her hollow show of pleading my case, then went to pull me toward a seat, but the moment she rose her body swayed.
Even though she steadied herself almost at once, Lorenzo still shoved me aside in a heartbeat.
Heedless of his mother standing right there, heedless of the soldiers along the wall, he gathered Gioia into his arms and asked anxiously:
"Gioia, are you all right? You're carrying, why did you come out here on your own? Where's Matteo?"
Gioia laughed, sweet and cloying, her hand pressing flat against her belly:
"Matteo's away on business in the States. He's taking over the seat soon, he's swamped."
She looked at me, a taunt in her eyes, and crooned to Lorenzo in a simpering voice:
