I bit my lip, still wanting to say something, but he clicked his tongue, impatient. The signet ring on his hand caught the low light as he waved me off.
"If you've got anything else, say it all now."
I shook my head in silence and turned to go.
The instant the heavy door closed behind me, I heard a girl's bright voice come through his phone.
"Your wife's asking for a dissolution! Aren't you going to go smooth things over?"
Lorenzo answered flatly.
"I wouldn't lend her the tribute, so she's sulking. That's all."
"She won't actually walk away from the Vitale name."
I stood outside the door, and a cold settled over my chest.
From the day I got pregnant, Lorenzo had made me leave my place in the Family's legal apparatus.
It was only because the doctors said his blood ran thin for children that we'd managed to have this baby at all, and nothing could be allowed to go wrong.
He said he brought in the cash to provide for me and the baby, so I could rest and carry the pregnancy in peace.
I gave it all up, going from the sharpest negotiator the Family had, trained to sit across from consiglieri twice my age and not blink,
to Signora Vitale, who waited inside the walls of the estate every day for her husband to come home.
But I soon learned that "never short on money" never once meant I was allowed to spend it.
When I bought prenatal vitamins, I had to send the receipt to Carmela.
When I ordered a single nightgown, I had to ask Carmela first whether it was appropriate.
When I went to the doctor for checkups, I had to keep even the car fare and wait for it all to be reimbursed against the household ledger at the end of the month.
Once, I only wanted to buy my mother a scarf, and Carmela folded her hands at her waist, lowered her eyes, and reported it straight to Lorenzo.
That night, he sat across the long dining table, the silver set down too deliberately, his tone as flat as if he were correcting a child who didn't know any better.
"Francesca, I pulled you out of the work so you could rest and carry the blood of this bloodline, not so you could learn from those small-minded women who marry into a name and then scheme every way they can to claw cash out of my hands."
I rushed to explain.
"I didn't. That day was my mother's sixtieth birthday. You'd sworn you'd come back with me to sit at her table, but something came up in the district, so I bought a scarf in your place—"
Lorenzo's face went cold. He cracked one knuckle of his right hand, slow.
"In my place?"
"Francesca, don't go using my name to buy favor with your old family."
"Today it's a scarf. Tomorrow will you have me buying them a house, a car?"
"Since you carry the Vitale name now, you keep your distance from the blood you came from. Better to cut it clean while you can, before they drag you down into the gutter, and me with you."
That was the first time the thought of dissolution stirred in me.
But the next evening, when Lorenzo came home, he carried an elegant gift box, the kind that passed through the front's finest shops.
He wrapped his arms around me from behind, his voice low and rough.
"Francesca, I'm sorry."
"I spoke too harshly last night."
"It's just that I've watched too many women throw themselves at me for what my name can buy."
"Adriana swore on everything that she loved me too, back then, and in the end she left me for a richer protector."
"She made me feel like there's hardly a soul in this world who loves the man and not the money he sits on. So the moment you say the word, I lose my head."
He buried his face against my shoulder, as though he really were worn down to the bone.
The hurt in my heart suddenly turned into aching tenderness for him.
After that, I lived carefully by his rules, trying to prove that what I loved was him, not the fortune the Family sat on.
But later, sorting his coats for the wash, I found a shop's receipt tucked in a breast pocket.
It listed the date Adriana was returning to the country.
It also listed the diamond bracelet he'd given her, worth seven figures of Family tribute.
And under the gift box he'd handed me, pressed beneath the velvet, was a thin promotional card.
Free with any qualifying purchase.
I stood in the laundry room a long time, holding that flimsy little card, my hands going still.
That sincerity I'd been killing myself to prove, in his eyes, had been worth nothing from start to finish.
The second time I thought about dissolution came in that very moment.
That night, my emotions had churned too hard, and in the middle of the night a pain gripped my belly, cold sweat breaking out layer after layer.
