I stood in the quiet that followed, listening to the engine of his car roar to life and tear down the long gravel drive, past the soldiers at the gate and out into the Chicago dark.
I shook my head. For a man who commanded fear and respect across half the territory, a man whose name made grown soldiers lower their eyes and straighten their collars, Lorenzo Hart could be remarkably childish.
He was gone for several days without coming home.
The estate settled into a familiar silence, the kind that crept through the hallways like fog rolling off the lake, slow and grey and patient. Another cold war. If this had been before, I would have been a wreck. I would have paced the cold marble of our bedroom at three in the morning, replaying every insignificant detail with surgical precision. Had I raised my voice when he came in late, his shoes scuffed, the faint smell of someone else's perfume clinging to his collar? Had I stirred in bed and disturbed the few hours of sleep a man in his position was ever granted? Had the dinner I'd asked the kitchen to lay out not been to his liking? Had I pushed too hard about the hours he kept, the late calls he took behind a locked study door, the names he never said aloud at the table?
I would have drowned in it. The self-doubt. The endless second-guessing. Turning myself inside out to find whatever flaw had driven him away again, as though the fault for his absence could only ever live in me.
But now, I actually enjoyed the peace while Lorenzo was away.
The house breathed differently without him in it. The two soldiers posted at the iron gate relaxed their shoulders by a fraction, their hands drifting away from the jackets that hid their pieces. Nora hummed an old country tune while she polished the long dining table that had seated more dangerous men than I cared to count. Even the light seemed to fall more gently through the tall windows of the sitting room, pooling soft and gold across the floor, as though the very walls of this house, walls that had absorbed so many whispered orders and harder silences, were grateful for the reprieve.
Seeing him from outside that toxic loop, with the clarity that distance and heartbreak had purchased at a price I was still paying in installments, Lorenzo seemed like a man with serious problems he refused to name. Quick to anger. Quicker to diminish. He carried himself like a sermon waiting to be delivered, always correcting, always positioning himself above, always certain that his way was the only way the world could be made to turn. A man being groomed for the Don's right hand, and he could not even sit at his own table without making it a throne.
I used to rush back from every errand, every quiet outing in the city, terrified that Lorenzo would return to the estate and find me missing. That he would read absence as disloyalty, the way men in this world read everything. That his hand would settle flat and motionless on his knee, that the stillness would come over him, and the evening would curdle into a silence so thick it pressed against my chest like a hand at my throat.
All that fear and worry now felt pointless. Every anxious concession, every swallowed word, every time I had rearranged myself to fit the shape of his expectations like a woman folding herself into a smaller and smaller box. All it ever did was make me feel marginally better in the moment, while Lorenzo grew more annoyed, as though my effort itself was an irritation, a reminder that he owed me something he had no intention of ever paying back.
