I leaned against the cold marble of the kitchen counter and let my eyes fall shut. The exhaustion wasn't in my body anymore. It had sunk past muscle and bone, settled somewhere in the marrow, in the quiet places no soldier could guard and no doctor could reach.
"Lorenzo, how many times have you actually come for me? Do you even remember? It takes me ten minutes to drive myself home, but I've stood at that window until ten at night because you swore you were on your way, only for you to call it off at the last second. Some emergency. Some fire on the territory that couldn't wait until morning. So tell me, is it really so strange that I forgot you offered this time?"
Silence answered me down the line. Not the silence of a man turning a thing over in his conscience. I knew that quiet too well to mistake it. It was the silence of a man weighing whether to press harder or pull back, the same stillness that fell over a room at the social club right before someone decided how much a debt was worth.
He hung up.
I set the phone down on the marble, the small click of it loud in the empty kitchen, and I let my shoulders rise and fall. This was the man I had married. Promises issued with the same casual authority he used to hand orders to his crew, and broken with that same flat indifference, as though my hours were a tribute he could skim from whenever the night ran long.
I put water on to boil. I made myself a plate of pasta with a simple sauce, the kind his grandmother might have spooned out without ceremony, and set a small dish of roasted vegetables beside it. I ate slowly at the counter, savoring each bite, letting the warmth of the food sink down into the hollow places inside me, the ones the cold marble couldn't touch.
It struck me, with a strange and quiet ache, how long it had been since I'd eaten a hot meal the moment it left the stove. In the early days of our union, even after I'd carried his child, I always came home before the light failed so I could cook. I set the long dining table in our brownstone as if it mattered, as if the act of laying out a meal for my husband carried the same sacred weight as the Sunday dinners his mother once hosted, where the whole bloodline gathered and every chair was claimed and no place was ever left empty. I lit the candles. I folded the napkins the way I'd been taught a Capo's wife should. But Lorenzo rarely made it through the door. There was always another meet, another problem on the turf, another late-night sit-down at the club that could not, under any circumstance, be moved.
So I usually ended up reheating food gone cold and eating alone at that long table, the empty chair across from me standing like a monument to his absence, a marble headstone for a marriage no one had yet thought to bury.
Whenever I had tried to tell Lorenzo how it carved at me, he'd snap before I finished the sentence. "I'm running a territory, Adriana. I'm busy. If you don't like it, don't cook. But don't stand there bleeding after you've gone to the trouble. I can't build my life around your schedule." The words came smooth and final, the voice of a man used to closing arguments with his name alone.
Back then, God help me, I'd felt sorry for him. I told myself this life was hard, that the weight of holding the Don's favor while managing soldiers and shipments and the rival Families circling our streets would break a lesser man before breakfast. So after he lashed out, I stopped asking for anything at all. I simply waited. Quietly. Patiently. The way a good wife in this world was raised to wait. The way the Family taught its women to swallow the silence and call it loyalty.
