On the twenty-ninth day after Lorenzo Moretti recovered his memory, his mother came to find me once again.
"There's a satchel here. Thirty million, untraceable. You have three days to leave the country. I don't want to see you again!"
She threw the bundle of cash at my feet, her eyes brimming with contempt.
Calmly, I picked it up.
I didn't argue my case with red-rimmed eyes the way I used to.
Instead, I nodded obediently and said, "Fine."
Seeing me so compliant, Vittoria Moretti's lips curved into a sneer as she looked down on me from her height. She turned the heavy widow's ring on her finger in a slow half-circle, weighing me the way a woman weighs a debt she has already decided not to pay.
"A gutter girl who dreams of a made man's ring. Have you even looked at what you are?"
"Someone with no name, no blood, no Family behind her shouldn't dream of marrying into the Morettis in three lifetimes, let alone one."
"You're being sensible this time."
"Remember, you only have three days!"
"And one more thing." She slid the ring off entirely and set it against her palm, done with me. "I don't want Lorenzo to know I was ever here."
——
With that, she turned and walked out on her high heels.
The door of the compound closed behind her with a dull thud.
The room went eerily quiet, nothing left but the sound of my own breathing.
Slowly I crouched down and picked up the satchel that had been thrown to the floor, my fingertips trembling faintly. My thumb found the bare inside of my left wrist and pressed flat against it, the place where other women in this world wore a Family's jewelry and I wore nothing.
Thirty million. For someone with no name, more than several lifetimes of honest work could ever earn.
Yet in that moment it felt like a branding iron pulled from the fire, searing straight into my chest.
I left the Moretti estate and went back to the run-down rental by the water.
This was where Lorenzo and I had once lived together.
Paint peeling off the walls, cheap furniture, a ceiling that still leaked.
I walked to the bed and gently smoothed the creases left in the sheets.
Memories came flooding back like a rising tide.
Three years ago, in the winter, I ran into Lorenzo on my way home from work.
That night the snow was blowing hard, and he stood there in a thin, torn shirt, his forehead covered in blood.
Barefoot at the roadside, his eyes as hollow as a lost child's.
I meant to walk around him, but he suddenly grabbed my sleeve, his voice so faint I could barely hear it: "Help me…"
I hesitated, and in the end I still took him home.
Back then he remembered nothing, not even his own name.
We lived together for three years.
I taught him to cook, and he made a mess of the whole kitchen with his clumsy hands.
I took him to the pier, and he grinned like a child at the gulls wheeling overhead.
Every night we squeezed together onto the narrow, hard board bed.
He held me tight and said I was his only one.
Those days were poor and bare, but they were the warmest time of my life.
Until Lorenzo got his memory back.
He remembered his name, remembered that he was the eldest son of the Moretti Family, the one raised to inherit the whole bloodline.
And he remembered the night that had cost him his memory, the wound at his hairline that never fully faded.
He brought me back to the estate and gave me a life I wouldn't have dared to dream of before.
But from that day on, it was as if he'd become a different person.
Every day he wore suits cut in a language I didn't speak, a watch worth more than I'd see in ten lifetimes, moving behind the tinted glass of cars that never slowed.
He moved through the Family's clubs and back rooms, spoke of alliances and tribute in the same breath other men used for the weather, and stayed out night after night without coming home.
On the rare occasions we did meet, we barely exchanged two words.
At first I told myself he was the heir apparent now, the Don's chosen son, that it was normal for him to be pulled into the business of blood and money.
Until that night I came across the photographs.
Lorenzo, holding hands with a strange woman, the two of them chatting and laughing at a sit-down banquet, the kind where two Families measure each other over wine older than either of us.
When the image sharpened, I clearly saw the woman lower her head and murmur something against his ear.
And he turned his face slightly, a flicker of tenderness in his eyes that I had never seen before.
Everyone was whispering the same thing, that the Morettis and the Salvatores were a match sealed by God himself.
In that moment, my heart felt like it was seized by an invisible hand, squeezed so hard I could barely breathe.
I couldn't stop myself from calling him, and he explained impatiently: "The Salvatores and the Morettis have an arrangement. Camilla and I are only bound by Family business. People love to make something out of nothing."
