Just before dawn, I couldn't hold out any longer and drifted off against the couch in the sitting room, half-conscious under the low tick of the mantel clock.
Somewhere between sleep and waking, someone gently laid a blanket over me.
My eyes snapped open and I grabbed his wrist.
Lorenzo froze mid-motion.
He looked down at me, and for a single instant something panicked flickered in his eyes before his face hardened again into the mask the Vitale name required.
Clutching at his sleeve, I asked hoarsely,
"The dissolution papers. Did you read them?"
Lorenzo's expression went cold in an instant.
"Francesca, are you done making a scene?"
He pulled his hand back, like he'd been holding it in all night and finally couldn't anymore.
"You want to end this union over three hundred thousand dollars?"
I looked at him, and suddenly the whole thing felt so absurd I almost laughed.
"Lorenzo, that money is what's keeping my father alive."
"You're willing to drape a four-hundred-thousand-dollar collar on Adriana's dog, but you won't lend me three hundred thousand to save my father's life?"
Lorenzo's fists clenched, his face dark. His right hand rose, and one by one he cracked the knuckles, slow and deliberate.
"The money is mine. How I spend it is my business. It's none of yours."
I stared at him, numb.
"But don't forget."
"For this marriage, for our child, I gave up my place at the family's table on my own."
"Every year of tribute I earned, my savings from before the wedding, every cent I handed to you."
"You were so afraid I'd married in for the bloodline's claim that you wouldn't even let me live in the house your family kept ready. You insisted we buy our own."
"This home, I bought it myself. I paid the down payment myself."
My voice was cracking, little by little.
"Lorenzo, all I asked was to borrow three hundred thousand."
"After everything I've given you over the years, isn't that more than three hundred thousand already?"
Lorenzo's face was ugly.
But what rose in his eyes wasn't guilt. It was disappointment.
"Francesca, you're tallying up money with me now?"
He looked at me like it pained him to the core.
"I love you so much I'd give up my own life for you and the baby, and now you're counting dollars with me?"
He stepped back half a pace, as if he were finally seeing me clearly.
"Adriana was right after all."
"You married me for the money."
"You never brought it up before because the time wasn't right."
"The second something happens to your father, you start figuring out how to pull cash out of my hands."
A dry, hollow laugh escaped me.
"Think whatever you want."
I pushed the dissolution papers across to him. The paper slid over the polished wood and stopped against his hand.
"I want out. I won't take a single cent of your money. All I want is to sell the house and take back the down payment I paid."
Lorenzo's face turned to ice.
"No. I won't dissolve anything."
"This house is our marital home. You don't get to sell it. My name is on the deed too, and as long as I don't sign, you can't move it. Don't even dream about getting a cent."
I looked at him, and suddenly I didn't even have the strength left to argue.
"Lorenzo, you say you love me."
"And yet you'd stand there and watch my father die."
I said softly,
"Your love. It's terrifying."
Lorenzo pressed his lips into a thin line, as if my words had stung him.
But in the end he only turned and walked toward the study.
"Think it over carefully."
"Kidney failure is a bottomless pit. It'll bleed you dry for the rest of his life."
"You can choose the blood you came from, the ones who'll need you pouring money into them forever, or you can choose me and the baby."
"Francesca, it's your decision."
The study door closed again, and the lock turned with a small, final sound in the quiet house.
Lorenzo seemed to have forgotten that before I became the caged wife of a Don's heir, I had been the sharpest mind in a family's legal apparatus.
And what I was best at was severing unions like this one.
I'd left one last shred of dignity for our marriage, but now he'd torn it away.
Lorenzo's threats meant nothing to me anymore.
