I used to think I was the happiest woman in the world because I had the best husband. The kind of man other wives in the Family envied. Attentive. Present. The kind who brought flowers on Sundays and kissed your forehead before leaving for business he never explained. But reality hit me hard. It had all been a ridiculous facade. People's hearts are hidden behind their ribs, and their lies are scribbled on paper. Or in text messages sent from a safehouse in Maplewood where another woman was sleeping in sheets he paid for with money that belonged to the Family.
I set the phone facedown on the nightstand and closed the window myself.
The rain hit the glass from the outside. The silence pressed from within.
A few days later, I received the divorce papers my fixer had drafted.
They arrived in a plain manila envelope, hand-delivered by a man I'd never seen before who rang the bell, handed it to me without a word, and disappeared into a waiting sedan. No return address. No firm name on the cover letter. The fixer understood what he was dealing with. You don't send certified mail to a Moretti address. You don't leave a paper trail that the Family's consigliere might intercept before the wife ever sees it.
I sat at the kitchen table and read every page. The legalese was dense, but the architecture was clean. Grounds for severance. Division of assets limited to what I could prove was legitimately earned, which wasn't much, because in this family, legitimacy was a performance. No claim on Moretti holdings. No claim on territory. No alimony. I wasn't negotiating for money. I was negotiating for the right to leave alive and whole, with my name and my child and nothing else.
I printed them out. Signed my name. Olivia Ferraro. Not Moretti. Ferraro. The pen didn't shake.
Then I started packing.
Not everything. I didn't want everything. I wanted my clothes, my mother's rosary, the ultrasound photos from my first trimester that Dante had never asked to see, and the leather journal I'd kept hidden in the lining of my suitcase since the day I started building the dossier. Everything else in this house belonged to the Family. The furniture, the art, the security system, the name on the mailbox. Let them have it.
I was going back to my mother's place.
Just as I was getting ready to leave, my phone rang with an unknown number.