While You Stayed With Her,I Lost Everything

The day I hemorrhaged from the miscarriage, my mother and father raced through the rain toward the Family's clinic on the edge of the territory. On the way, a car came out of the dark and took them both.

I lay on the table and signed the blood pacts with hands still slick with my own blood, the papers a made person signs when life hangs in the balance.

The baby couldn't be saved. Neither could my parents.

And the man whose seventy-six calls had gone unanswered posted a glowing little celebration through the network.

【Congratulations, sweetie. After a long, hard night, you're finally a mother.】

Weak as I was, I tapped a like. A text from him came through at once.

Just one word. "Delete it."

I sent him the clinic's location.

"Come to the clinic. There's something I need to say to your face."

"I've got something important. I can't come! Have your parents take you to the checkup, they've got nothing better to do anyway."

"Your so-called important thing is delivering her dog's puppies?"

"How does carrying a child turn you into a jealous shrew? You're jealous of a dog now?"

I didn't have the strength to argue with him. If he wouldn't come, then he could talk to the Consigliere.

……

By the time I'd finished arranging my parents' burial, with all the quiet rites the Family owed its own, it was already the next evening.

I dragged my exhausted body to the door of our home and opened it.

The rooms I'd cleaned so carefully were a wreck.

Lorenzo Marchetti was bent over, rummaging for something, tossing whatever he touched onto the floor without a thought. Habit and certainty both, that someone would always clean up after him. The youngest Underboss the Marchetti name had ever made never picked up after himself. Other men did that.

He heard the door and didn't even lift his head, an edge of complaint in his voice.

"Where did you run off to all day on a Saturday? I had to send out for lunch."

I went still. So he hadn't come home last night either.

For two years now, he'd always been like this.

When a light broke in Gianna Russo's apartment, he could drag himself out of bed in the dead of night to fix it for her. But he'd forget to bolt our own door, and a drunk had wandered in off the street, and I had nightmares about it for a solid month. A made man's wife, and he couldn't be bothered to turn a lock.

When Gianna's dog was about to whelp, he could refuse to take me to my checkup. But he'd cleared a whole week at her side beforehand, though that was work for some hireling, not for the Family's most trusted fixer.

Getting no answer, Lorenzo finally turned to look at me, surprise rising in his eyes.

"You're so pale. Is the baby giving you trouble again?"

I stepped back, away from the hand reaching for my belly, my voice flat.

"I called you seventy-six times yesterday. Why didn't you pick up?"

Lorenzo's hand was still hanging in the air. He frowned at the question. He cracked one knuckle of his right hand, slow, the way he did with men who weren't worth his time.

"Adriana Vitale, are you interrogating me?"

"Gianna and I grew up together. And Sweetie isn't like the other animals in her parlor. She's raised that dog at her side since it was small. They have a deep bond."

"Sweetie was whelping. Gianna was worried sick. I had to help with the delivery. In a life-and-death moment like that, who has time to answer your pointless calls?"

"It was just a checkup. Plenty of women in your condition go on their own. And if not, you had your parents, they've got nothing else to do anyway. What difference does it make if I'm not there?"

I watched him stand there so righteous. The room had gone very quiet, only the slow tick of the clock on the mantel, loud as a dripping tap.

I wanted so badly to ask, then where are my parents?

That crash was brutal. My father had no pulse by the time they carried him into the clinic. My mother made it as far as the table, but her injuries were too deep, too tangled. The Surgeon, the Family's own elite fixer, the man who unmade death for a living, said that perhaps only if Lorenzo cut for her himself would there be a sliver of a chance.

He said he had no time to answer my calls. Yet the moment I tapped a like on that post, he could appear at once to order me to take it back. Terrified Gianna might read into it.

"Really just childhood friends?"

"But Lorenzo, I saw you kiss her."

In the very restaurant where he'd asked me to take his name. In the exact same seats, under the same low light, with the same waiters who knew to keep their eyes down when a Marchetti dined.

In my daze that day, I never saw the motorcycle speeding toward me.

The rider braked in time. But that little life inside me, only three months along, was gone in the end all the same.