"Do you think Salvatore will blame me for this?"
Before I could get an answer, Salvatore walked in.
He stopped short at the scene before him, his eyes sweeping back and forth over me. In the corner, the enforcer at the door went still, the way men in that house always did when the acting boss entered a room.
After a long pause, he finally said.
"Gina is still young and naïve. Your father's condition was beyond saving. Maybe ending things sooner was a mercy."
"I'll make sure to send more tribute to your mother's memory in the future."
The beeping from the monitor continued, each beep announcing my father's death.
I stood there, rooted to the spot. Besides the sadness and grief, there was also a sense of relief.
Salvatore ignored me and walked away, carrying Gina.
I collapsed on the ground, exhausted, and kept apologizing to my father. Still, I wondered who had ever been sorry to me.
I pulled out the marker of protection and made the call.
"Don Falcone, please come pick me up tonight."
The same crematorium, the same rites, the same silence that a Family bought when it wanted no questions asked.
This time, I left my father's ashes in the memorial hall.
When I returned to the Gallo compound, Salvatore wasn't back yet.
Those nine women kept whispering in my ear that Salvatore was furious and I was doomed.
I paid them no mind. They trailed me through the halls, asking again and again if I was really going to sever the pact.
I didn't answer. I simply opened the bedroom door.
"Choose. Everything in here is yours."
When I said that, they swarmed in and the room was instantly emptied.
Only a few old photographs of Salvatore and me from our younger days lay scattered across the floor, ignored by everyone.
I locked myself in my room and didn't come out all evening.
Salvatore sent Zia Rosaria up to ask after me. She wiped her hands slowly on her apron before she spoke, as if cleaning them of the order she'd been told to carry. I simply had her hand him my papers to sever the pact.
"Another one."
"It's been a hundred times already, Adriana. Aren't you tired of playing this game?"
Salvatore tore the papers to shreds.
"Let her starve. Don't give her food until she stops acting up."
Salvatore thought my talk of severing the pact, my saying I didn't love him, was also part of the game.
Still, love could truly run out.
Ten years. I really couldn't love that man anymore.
Now that I was alone, what else couldn't I let go of?
That night, I climbed out the window and slipped into Lorenzo's car.
Salvatore didn't see me moving through the dining room the next morning.
There was no toast he loved on the table, no coffee I had made by my own hand, no pressed and matched suit waiting on the hanger.
Salvatore rushed upstairs and threw open my room, but found it empty.
He picked up a few of the photographs from the floor, and the panic took him.
"Zia Rosaria. Where is Adriana?"
Zia Rosaria hurried in at the sound, the spatula still in her hand. She looked at the empty room and shook her head to say she didn't know.
"I'll call her mother."
She went still, then asked before she could stop herself.
"Sir, isn't Adriana's mother dead? She was cremated the day after."
Salvatore's mind flashed back to the sight of me holding the urn, and his breath hitched. The unlit cigarette between his fingers stopped turning.
He bent down slowly and gathered the photographs from the floor. His eyes were empty, hollow, as if all the life had drained out of him.
For ten years, he never thought that I would really leave him.
