The air outside the law office tasted of exhaust fumes and the metallic tang of impending snow.
I took a deep breath, trying to clear the phantom taste of licorice and rot from the back of my throat.
It was a flavor I knew too well.
For three years, Lucia, Dante's mother, had brewed a thick, noxious sludge in her kitchen.
"Drink, Elena," she would command, her eyes as unyielding as granite. "This will open you up. This will make you fruitful."
I drank it.
Every single morning.
It made me gag as it slid down my throat.
Moments later, it made my stomach cramp until I was curled in a ball on the cold bathroom floor.
Dante would stand in the doorway, watching me heave.
He would offer me a peppermint afterwards, his hand idly stroking my hair.
"I'm sorry, baby," he would say. "But Ma knows best. We need a son."
He watched me poison myself for a lie.
I looked at his back now as he walked toward the waiting black SUV.
He was striding with purpose, his shoulders squared in that arrogant way of his.
He didn't care about the cramps.
He didn't care about the humiliation of the monthly fertility rituals where the village crones would poke and prod my stomach like I was livestock.
He only cared about the result.
And since I couldn't give him the result, I was nothing.
The wind whipped my hair across my face, stinging my cheeks.
I remembered the day the doctor had slid the file across his mahogany desk.
Azoospermia.
Zero sperm count.
Dante was the sterile one.
I had burned the file in the bathroom sink that night, watching the truth turn to ash.
I had walked into the bedroom and told him that I was the problem.
I did it to save him from the mockery of the other Capos.
In our world, a man who cannot sire a child is seen as weak.
A weak Don is a dead Don.
I had saved his life with that lie.
And this was how he repaid me.
"Elena, move it," Dante called out, holding the car door open.
He looked annoyed.
He looked like a man who was inconvenienced by the chore of taking out the trash, not the disposal of his wife.
I walked toward him.
I didn't run.
I didn't cry.
I just walked, letting the bitter taste in my mouth turn into fuel.
He thought he was discarding a broken vessel.
He had no idea he was lighting the fuse on a living, breathing bomb.
