Cold sweat broke out across my skin. I felt pain coursing through me while my husband knelt on the floor of a hospital corridor, cradling the woman who carried his child, and looked at me like I was the threat. Like I was the one who had broken something sacred.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. A nurse passed at the end of the corridor, glanced at the scene, and kept walking. In this city, you learned not to get involved when a Valente was in the room.
I pressed my back against the wall and breathed. The pain in my abdomen pulsed with each heartbeat. The discharge papers lay scattered on the floor between us, face down, the words hidden.
Maybe I made the right decision not to keep the baby. A man who didn't love his wife wouldn't love his kid either.
When I came back to the Valente estate, the house was empty. The guards were at their posts. The kitchen smelled faintly of the lunch that the housekeeper had prepared and no one had eaten.
I sat at the kitchen table and opened my phone. I was going to write something. I didn't know what yet. Something that would make the silence inside me into words that other people could hear.
Then I saw it.
The latest whisper through the wives' network. Someone had seen Silvana leaving the clinic that afternoon with a man. She'd described him in detail to anyone who would listen. Not his face. His back. The breadth of his shoulders. The way he held the door for her. The way his hand rested on her waist as they walked to the car.
I knew that back. I knew those shoulders. I had stared at them across the darkness of our bedroom for three years, watching them rise and fall with the breathing of a man who slept peacefully beside a woman he did not love.
The description was accompanied by Silvana's own words, repeated through the network with the faithful accuracy of women who understood that every syllable was a weapon: Having a man who loves me makes me feel so safe.
The responses came from Simone's inner circle. His associates. The men who drank with him at the social club and laughed at his jokes and would follow him into any room he entered.
Rocco Valente had spoken first, because Rocco always spoke first: That back doesn't look like her husband's, ha.
Dario Ferretti, running his hand through his hair and glancing around the club before opening his mouth: Nice one. You've won back your goddess.