Dominic looked almost disoriented.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “That’s just all I’m willing to do in public.”
I picked up my bag.
“Don’t come to the house tonight.”
His eyes narrowed. “It’s my house too.”
“No,” I said. “It’s the house I designed, financed through a trust my father established long before our marriage, and protected with a deed your lawyers clearly never checked closely enough.”
That hit him harder than Serena’s imaginary or real pregnancy had hit me.
He stood halfway, then stopped.
“You’re bluffing.”
“Then bring a locksmith.”
I left him there with the skyline at his back and the first crack of uncertainty in his face.
By the time I reached the parking garage, my hands were shaking so hard I had to brace them against the roof of my car.
Ten years.
Ten years of dinners, funerals, campaigns, redevelopment meetings, family holidays, whispered deals, avoided questions, careful compromises, and nights spent convincing myself that being loved by a dangerous man was not the same thing as living in danger.
For exactly forty seconds, I let myself break.
Then I got into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and remembered Rosa Bellucci.
My mother-in-law had died eleven months earlier, and I still heard her voice with impossible clarity. She had been in hospice on the north side, pale and regal and furious at death for having the audacity to approach her before she had put her house in order.
Three nights before she passed, she asked everyone else to leave the room.
“Not him,” she had whispered when Dominic rose to follow the nurse. “Especially not him.”
After he left, Rosa pulled a small silver token from beneath her pillow. It was old, worn smooth with time, and stamped with a faded transit insignia.
“LaSalle,” she said.
I frowned. “What is this?”
“A door.”
I smiled sadly. “Rosa, I don’t know what that means.”
“You will,” she said. Her fingers closed over mine with startling strength. “Listen to me carefully, Lena. If Dominic ever humiliates you in public, if he ever mistakes your loyalty for stupidity, if he ever asks you to sign something quickly… go where the city remembers.”
I had stared at her, unsettled.
She looked toward the dark window, where the reflection of her own face floated like a ghost.
“I spent too many years helping men bury their sins,” she said. “When I understood what it would cost, I made sure one woman could unbury them.”
Then she pressed the token into my palm.
“Not my son,” she whispered. “You.”
I had hidden the token in my jewelry box and never spoken of it again.
That night, sitting in my car with Dominic’s warning still in my ears, I drove not toward home but toward the Loop.
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