Thrill recedes as worry takes it place. “Everything alright?” I ask, easy, the kind of easy that lets people keep dignity if they need to lie.
Her head snaps up and she pastes on composure fast enough to make something inside me twist and ache. “Yes. Fine.”
We both hear the wrong note.
She knows I hear it; I know she knows.
For a moment the city and the lilies and the elevator’s distant bell fall away and it’s ten summers ago and I’m standing in a driveway swallowing pride like stones while she is carried past in a car that smells like new leather and other men’s money.
“The investors are impressed by you,” I say mildly, giving her a bridge back. “And Mara likes the way you made them like you.”
My wife exhales, a small, careful release and clearly distracted. “Good. That’s… good.”
Her phone buzzes a new message.
She hurriedly locks the screen without looking and slides the device into her clutch like it’s a hot blade she means to keep barehanded. When I step closer she doesn’t step back, which is its own mercy and its own alarm.
“History isn’t repeating itself,” I say softly. “It can’t.”
She blinks. “No,” she says, and there’s steel in it I want to believe is for both of us. She touches the edge of my lapel, a small straightening that shouldn’t hit like a vow. “It can’t.”
She’s wearing my ring.
The press would call it optics; my mother would call it evidence; I call it what it is: a circle I put there and mean to keep.
“Come back in when you can,” I tell her, thumb brushing her knuckles once. “The pension fund likes to see us together when I say the wordforever.”
A muscle flickers in her jaw. “Forever is a big word to be throwing around so frivolously.”
“There’s nothing frivolous about the things I mean to make happen, baby. Trust me on that.”
Her mouth quivers; the ghost of a smile, or a flinch. She nods. “Two minutes.”
I leave her in the lilies and glass because dragging secrets into the light requires timing as much as finesse.
Back at the table, I answer a question about environmental benchmarks on the island and accept a compliment I barely hear. From the corner of my eye I catch her return, composed, luminous, dangerous in the way that makes cameras reconsider their angles.
I tell myself I’ll ask tonight.
I tell myself trust is not a trophy, it’s a muscle.
I tell myself all the reasonable things men who have been hurt teach themselves to sound less like boys.
What I don’t tell myself is the line that writes itself across the inside of my skull as I watch her laugh at something Mara says and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear with fingers that shook five minutes ago.
There are many soft places to thrust a sword.
And while I have spent a lifetime learning where to strike, I should have taken time to protect my own flanks.
19
NAOMI
Amalfi is obscenely breathtaking in the way only perfect places can be.
The villa clings to the cliff in blush pink tiers and white columns, bougainvillea tumbling like confetti down staircases that lead to nowhere except better views. And below, the black-hulled yacht gleams like a promise someone intends to keep on camera.
We are in full honeymoon mode, the final push to reassure three different teams—Vecchio’s people, the trust, and a restless fund in New York—that the Dillinger marriage isn’t a stunt with an expiration date, and so we smile while photographers try to catch us unguarded and the sea tries to seduce.
