Fearing my sobs might carry across the marble and reach the men I had just walked away from, I pressed my hand hard against my mouth and forced my feet to move.
But halfway home, somewhere along the quiet road that wound past the old shipping warehouses my father's name once protected, my legs simply surrendered beneath me. I went down hard onto the pavement, palms scraping stone, the cold of the ground rising up through my dress like a verdict.
I dragged myself home, battered and hollowed out, and reached for my phone with hands that would not stop shaking. I dialed Don Marchetti.
"Padrino," I said, and was distantly amazed my voice held. "I've decided to come. I'll take the place in your clean operations. In Lunaria."
The old Don was pleased. I could hear it in the warmth that came down the line. But he was also puzzled, and Lucian Marchetti was a man who had survived four decades in this life precisely because he never let puzzlement go unspoken.
"You told me you meant to settle here, cara, once the union was sealed. Did your promised man agree to let you cross into another Family's territory? Distance between a husband and wife after the joining of bloodlines is a hard thing, harder than most can bear. Are you certain you don't want to weigh this more carefully?"
I was dabbing at the raw, bleeding skin of my knees as he spoke, each press of the cloth sending a sharp, clean pang up through me. The pain was almost a mercy. It was simpler than the other thing.
"There will be no union," I said. "It's finished. From this night forward I'm yours, Padrino. Your right hand. I'll give everything I have to the work."
Don Marchetti had stood beside my father in the years before the Bellucci name went quiet, and he had loved me since I was a girl in pigtails at his table. He heard the wound in me before I named it. He did not press. That, more than anything, was why I trusted him.
"Tonight is the deadline for the list," he said, his voice gentling into something steady, something to lean against. "I'll set your name down myself. Come to me soon, and we'll bury ourselves in it together. Keeping the hands busy keeps the mind from circling its own grave."
There was a pause then, the kind that in our world is never empty. The faint clink of ice settling in a glass somewhere on his end. The patience of a man choosing his next words the way another man chooses a knife.
"I'll not pretend it isn't my place, since I stood for your father and that makes you mine to look after. But understand me. These two years, it has always been you crossing into his territory, always you tending him, and never once has he set foot in Lunaria to tend you. A man shows where his loyalty lives by where his feet carry him. That arrangement was a message, child, written plain. He does not love you the way you believed."
He let it land. Then, softer. "And when a woman has made up her mind to walk away, she does not stand in the doorway of the past, looking back."
If it weren't for that thick stack of flight stubs, I could have brushed off the Padrino's words about how he doesn't love you. I could have laughed and defended Lorenzo the way I had defended him a hundred times to a hundred people who saw him clearer than I did.
But the tickets. God, the tickets.
No wonder he had always gone dark at the end of every month, his phone swallowed by static, his messages thinning to nothing. I had told myself it was the work, the pressure of a crew he was still building, the long nights a soldier owes the rackets when he is clawing his way toward capo. I had made his absence into a virtue.
He had been crossing thousands of miles, all that while, to be at Bianca's side.
For two full years I had played the fool with my whole heart. I had raced through every obligation, finished every task the Family set me, closed out the books on the clean operations early just to steal a handful of days, just to make the journey across rival territory to see him. Those brief reunions at the end of long, exhausting trips had once been the happiest hours of my life. I had held them like relics.
And my devotion, my faithful crossing of the distance between us, had become nothing in the face of that stack of stubs Lorenzo had kept. He had kept them. Not mine. Hers. He had cherished the record of his betrayals and let mine collect dust.
On my way to the Family gathering, I had still been trying to build him an excuse, even then. Maybe he came to Lunaria for the work, I told myself, with the desperate generosity of a woman who does not yet want to see. Maybe there is a reason that doesn't end me.
Then I saw him on one knee at the heart of the gathering, the betrothal stone catching the light as he offered it up to Bianca Vitale. The very woman who had spent my childhood teaching me what cruelty felt like.
In that single moment everything aligned with a terrible, simple clarity. I understood at last why he had never come to me, though scarcely a hundred kilometers of road lay between us.
Bianca had forbidden it. She had kept him from my door, and left him to spin his pretty stories of longing and sacrifice to paper over the absence. He knew precisely what she and I were to each other. He knew we were sworn enemies, that there was blood in the ground between us, old and unhealed.
After my father married into that broken household, Bianca and her mother had become the most relentless shadows of my girlhood. There was a rank to suffering in that house, and weakness decided who paid it. I had been the one who paid.
Over two years of crossing territory to love a man who would not cross it back, I had run a thousand fearful scenarios in my mind. I had let myself imagine that Lorenzo might one day turn to someone else. A man on the rise gathers temptations the way he gathers debts. But never her. Never Bianca, of all the women in the world. And never in my darkest imagining had I believed he would agree to let me be humiliated at my own joining ceremony, paraded and shamed before the whole community, simply to please her.
I lowered myself into a bath drawn near scalding, and let the heat work into my bones until the trembling finally loosened its grip and began, by degrees, to still. I pressed my thumb to the bare strip of skin where his ring had sat for so long, smoothed the emptiness there once, and then folded my hands together in the water and held them.
I had already decided.
Then the phone lit, and Lorenzo's name surfaced on the screen like something rising from dark water.
"Adriana, where are you? I'm at the seaside park already."
