The room goes very still.
I step forward.
And it’s only then that I see the phone lying next to her. The screen isn’t dark with inactive mode. It’s showing the red lines of a device still active. “You recorded the conversation?”
Her lips part, and for a moment she looks as though she might deny it out of sheer exhaustion, but then she exhales, steadying herself, and gives the smallest nod.
“Yes.”
Of course she did.
My smart, furious, impossible wife, who survives on instinct and spite and a kind of stubborn intelligence that refuses to let anyone corner her without leaving teeth marks behind.
Her fingers tremble as she reaches for her phone, the result, I suspect, of holding too much inside herself, and then she presses play.
Isabella’s voice spills into the room, smooth with entitlement and sharp with intent, every syllable carefully chosen to sound civilised while carrying something rotten underneath it.
A threat delivered politely.
A warning wrapped in elegance.
When it ends, the silence that follows feels heavy, as if the walls themselves are listening.
Lucia’s breathing has gone uneven, and I see fear and rage fighting for dominance in the same chest.
My wife is afraid, but she’s also furious.
Blindingly so.
My own breathing’s too controlled. Too calm.
That calm has always been the most dangerous thing about me, I’m told, because it is what arrives right before I destroy something.
I look at her, taking in the tightness around her mouth, the brightness in her eyes that she refuses to let fall.
“You are distraught,” I say, because naming it is the first step in containing it.
“I’m fucking angry,” she snaps back immediately, and the sound of it is sharp enough to cut. “I am terrified, and I am—” Her voice breaks on the last word, not from fragility, but from sheer frustration at how much she is being forced to carry. “I know you’ve endured this kind of bullshit your whole life. But I’m getting tired of being the thing people move around to get to you,” she finishes, and the hatred in it is not only for them, but for the position she has been shoved into. “You know how much I hate chess.”
I cross the room without thinking, closing the distance in two strides, and I take her face between my hands, forcing her to look at me.
“You are not a thing,” I tell her, voice rough with conviction.
She gives a bitter laugh that tastes like disbelief. “Aren’t I?”
“No,” I answer, harder now, because softness will not reach her in this moment. “You are my wife. The beginning. And the end.”
Her breath catches at the word, because it is both comfort and curse.
“And that,” she whispers, furious and shaking all at once, “is exactly why they’re circling. Why they won’t stop circling.”
There’s a finality in there that snags hard at something exposed and borderline vulnerable inside me.
…keep an eye on the clock too. Before time punishes you.
I’m not sure why Caterina’s words return, punching me hard in the gut. Not even sure why I turn away, needing air, needing space to think?—
And why I almost wish I hadn’t.
