As I sat there turning over the difference between how Dominic treated his aide and the woman who had shared his bed for seven years, my fork slipped from my fingers and clattered against the tile floor. My hands were trembling when I bent to retrieve it.
By the time I straightened up, Dominic was already standing at the entrance of the kitchen, jacket on, keys in hand. He didn't look back.
"Something came up at the club. I'll give you a ride next time," he said, and the front door closed behind him before the sentence had fully settled in the room.
The two soldiers stationed outside the townhouse didn't acknowledge me when I left thirty minutes later. They never did. I was the Don's woman in name, which meant I existed in a category no one knew how to handle: not family, not civilian, not quite anything that had a protocol.
I limped into the back office of the Sloane import-export front on Mulberry Street. My desk sat in the narrow room behind the legitimate operation, where the real books lived. For some reason, every associate I passed that morning looked at me with something between pity and discomfort, the way men look at someone who's already dead but hasn't been told yet.
Later, while filling my mug in the small kitchen off the hallway, I overheard two of the women from the front office whispering to each other through the half-open door.
"So it's true? The Don really passed over Olivia for that girl? The Vitale girl?"
"You should have seen it this morning. Penelope came in with some little stain on her dress, and he picked her up. Right there in the back room, in front of everyone at the sit-down. Carried her like she was made of glass."
My hand slipped. The mug hit the edge of the counter and shattered on the floor, and the whispering stopped like someone had cut a wire.
I crouched down and gathered the pieces one by one, placing each shard carefully into the trash can without saying a word. Neither woman came around the corner. Neither woman said my name.
I ended up working late. The books for the Mancini transition needed to be clean before I left, and I owed the operation that much, even if I owed Dominic nothing. It was past ten o'clock when I felt a weight settle across my shoulders.
"Olivia." Dominic's voice was low, close to my ear. He draped his coat over me. "Why didn't you respond to my messages?"
I didn't turn around. Instead, I reached for my phone and checked the screen. One message from him: What flavor of milkshake do you usually like?
Three years ago, during the first real heat of summer, I had asked him for a milkshake. Just that. Something cold and sweet on a day that felt endless. He'd looked at me the way he looked at associates who brought him problems instead of solutions. Pure disdain.
"Milkshake? You want me to order a milkshake for you? Olivia, you're almost 30. Don't make me sick with this childish crap."
Those exact words. I'd memorized them the way you memorize the location of a bruise so you stop pressing on it by accident.
But now, behind me, there he was. Bringing me a milkshake.
I kept my eyes fixed on the computer screen and ignored the sweating cup he'd set beside my keyboard. The sweetness of it reached me anyway, faint and artificial.
I could feel his expression shifting. The silence had a texture to it, the particular quality of Dominic Sloane realizing something wasn't going the way he expected.
"You used to beg me for this," he said. Confused. As if I were the one who had changed the rules.
"It's past ten. If I drink it now, I won't be able to sleep," I said, and my voice came out flat. Emptied of everything I used to pour into it when I spoke to him.
A pause. The kind of pause that, in the old days, would have sent me scrambling to soften whatever I'd said, to smooth the crease forming between his brows.
Then, cold: "I'm going to the bathroom. We'll go home together after."
