I caught the faint tremor in his eyes—that involuntary flicker of the jaw, the way his pupils contracted like a man hearing a gunshot in the distance—and I already knew who was on the other end of that phone.
I sat back down.
Just as I expected, the call lasted less than a minute. And when it ended, so did his presence. He rose without a word, without apology, without even the decency of a backward glance. The chair didn't scrape—Domenico Moretti moved through the world too precisely for that. He simply stood, adjusted his cufflinks, and was gone.
I listened to the sound of the engine turning over beyond the window. The low growl of the black Maserati pulling away from the estate's front drive, its headlights sweeping across the iron gates like searchlights leaving a prison yard.
A bitter smile tugged at the corner of my lips.
The dining room was dark now. The birthday candles—the ones I had lit myself, for myself—guttered in the stillness, their small flames casting my solitary shadow against the silk-papered wall. One shadow. One woman. Seated at a table set for two where only one had ever truly arrived.
I pressed my palms together over the dying light and made my wish for twenty-four.
This year, Ilaria Colletti, you will stop loving Domenico Moretti.
Three days later, our graduating class from the Computer Science department held an old associates' gathering—one of those civilian affairs that existed in a world I had once belonged to, before blood oaths and compound walls had swallowed me whole.
I didn't realize until I arrived that Domenico was there too.
He stood at the center of a loose constellation of former classmates, the way powerful men always do—not because they seek the center, but because the room rearranges itself around them. His suit was charcoal, his posture relaxed in that particular way that only men accustomed to absolute authority can manage in a crowd of civilians. He looked like what he was: a wolf who had wandered into a room full of house cats, and every single one of them could feel it in their bones.
But the moment he spotted me in the doorway, something shifted behind his dark eyes. He crossed the room without excusing himself from the conversation—because a Don does not excuse himself—and sat down beside me.
The two of us sitting together altered the chemistry of the entire private dining room. Conversations stumbled. Laughter thinned. Glances sharpened and then quickly looked away.
I knew it was because of me.
In the eyes of our former classmates—people who had known me as a quiet, orphaned scholarship student with no family name worth mentioning—my marriage to Domenico Moretti could only be explained by one word: ambition. They believed I had clawed my way into the most powerful crime family on the East Coast through calculation and opportunism. That I had seen a fleeing bride and seized my chance like a vulture descending on a carcass.
None of them knew that I had loved him for seven years before I ever spoke his name aloud.
None of them respected me.
But I didn't care about their petty assumptions. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, my expression as still and unreadable as the surface of a frozen lake. Three years inside the Moretti estate had taught me that much, at least. How to make my face a wall. How to swallow fire and exhale nothing.
The class president arrived fashionably late—a man who had gone into legitimate finance and still carried himself with the nervous energy of someone who suspected that half the people in the room could have him disappeared. He lugged a large cardboard box through the door and greeted everyone with a grin that was trying very hard to be casual.
"So—two reasons I called this gathering together. First, to catch up. See some old faces. Second—" He hoisted the box onto the table. "Remember that activity from senior year? 'Write a Letter to Yourself Five Years from Now'? Well, five years are up. I brought the box. Let's crack them open."
A murmur rippled through the room. People surged forward, the noise level spiking with the particular giddiness of adults being offered a glimpse of their younger, more vulnerable selves.
"Let's make it interesting—everyone draws a random letter and reads it aloud!"
"Yes! Let me go first!"
The loudest man in our graduating class—a broad-shouldered former rugby player who now ran a string of car dealerships in New Jersey—elbowed his way to the front and plunged his hand into the box.
A few people who had no idea what was about to unfold egged him on with whistles and applause. He tore the envelope open, cleared his throat with theatrical relish, and unfolded the paper.
"'Dear Ilaria Colletti, five years from now—how are you?'"
The name landed in the room like a dropped blade.
"'I'm writing this to you in the sunshine. I don't know where you'll be or how you'll feel when you read this, but I want to capture exactly what I'm feeling right now and send it forward to you.'"
After that first paragraph, the entire room went quiet. The kind of quiet that descends when someone accidentally kicks open a door that was supposed to stay locked. Every pair of eyes in the room drifted toward me—some curious, some cruel, some carrying the particular gleam of people who smell blood in the water.
Domenico, who had been scrolling through messages on his phone—the endless stream of communications that kept a criminal empire breathing—looked up. Surprise flickered across his face, genuine and unguarded, as his gaze found mine.
My expression—the one that rarely betrayed anything, the mask I had perfected through a thousand solitary dinners and a thousand unanswered words—faltered.
Because I remembered what came next.
The man at the front glanced at me, registered the shift in the room's energy, and flashed a wicked grin. He was enjoying this. The whole room was. A private window into the inner life of the Don's quiet, invisible wife—how could they resist?
He kept reading.
"'This year, you're nineteen. You just started your sophomore year. And you've fallen for Domenico Moretti.'"
A sharp intake of breath from somewhere to my left. I didn't turn to see who.
"'He doesn't know. But even if he did, it wouldn't change a thing—because he already has someone he's promised to. Your secret feelings are destined to go nowhere.'"
The reader paused, savoring the silence the way a man savors expensive scotch. Then he continued.
"'You might ask me: if it's destined to end before it begins, why not just give up? Here's what I want to tell you. What I love is the way he charges forward with reckless courage when thousands of people are cheering his name at the championship match. It's the way he stepped in front of me without thinking to block a stray basketball in the evening breeze—not because he knew me, not because I mattered, but because that's simply who he is. It's the way he turns someone down—gently, sincerely—even when he's rejecting a confession. As though every heart that reaches for him still deserves to be handled with care.'"
The room had gone so still I could hear the ice shifting in someone's glass across the table.
"'The one who craned her neck at every Monday morning assembly just to steal a glance at him until her neck ached—that was me. The one who ran through a thunderstorm to slip medicine into his desk drawer after hearing he'd gotten hurt playing basketball—that was me. The one who filled an entire diary with his name in a single sleepless night—that was me.'"
I felt Domenico's gaze on the side of my face like the heat from an open furnace. I did not turn. I did not breathe.
"'Maybe for the rest of his life, he'll never even remember I exist. But that's okay. Because a secret love was always meant to be one person's beautiful catastrophe.'"
The letter ended.
The room was dead silent.
The candle flames on the table between us burned without flickering, as though even the air itself had stopped moving—holding its breath, the way the whole world seemed to hold its breath in the presence of something that had been buried alive and was now clawing its way to the surface.
I sat perfectly still, my hands folded, my face composed, my heart a ruin.
