Elio's eyes find me the minute I slip back into the kitchen, the corner of his lips lifting slightly. I smile back as the leather of my passport sleeve presses against the bare skin of my ribs beneath my bra, pretending everything is fine. Pretending the napkin with the daisy isn't neatly folded between the pages of my passport.
Maybe if Elio hadn't lied, things would have been different. If he just told me the truth, his reasons. Maybe there was something about Matt that I didn't know. That I couldn't have known. Maybe the man I love is not simply a jealous monster who murdered the only friend I had because he couldn't stand watching us sit in a garden together.
But he lied. And I hold the rage, and the grief, and the tiny poisonous seed that tells me I'm better off without Elio. That our child is better off.
I leave the kitchen and go to Elio's bedroom, the passport and the napkin go into a bag I find in the back of the closet along with a change of clothes. I pack as little as I can, knowing the less I take with me, the better.
At dinner it's only Elio and I, everyone else from the compound has left by now. Or maybe Elio got rid of them the way he did Matt. I push those thoughts away and watch him pour wine into our glasses with steady hands.
"How are you?" he asks, the way you ask someone you're afraid of spooking.
"Better." The word tastes like a lie. I wash it down with water, not touching the wine.
He nods. Doesn't push. Twists pasta around his fork, then puts it to his lips.
I want to ask him. Did you know what he meant to me? Did you think I didn't deserve the truth?
Did you do it because you loved me, or because you owned me, and can you tell the difference?
The questions pile up behind my teeth, but I swallow every single one.
Because I love him. Because I hate him. Because asking means answers, and there is no answer on this earth that will make Matt alive again. So instead, I reach across the distance.Across the linen and the bread and the glasses, and the wine I can't drink. My hand finds his.
His fingers close around mine immediately, relief moving through his face, as his jaw unclenches, and his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. His eyes soften into something that isn't the bottomless brown I know but something closer to the surface, something with light in it, and for one unguarded second he is not the head of anything. He is not Marchetti. He is just a man whose woman reached for him after days of silence and the relief of it has unmade him.
Is this love? Is this what love looks like on a man who was raised to believe love is a weakness? A man whose father taught him that affection is leverage and vulnerability is death? Is the relief real? Would it look different if it were something else? Possession, control, the satisfaction of something returned to its proper place in his collection?
I don't know.
I have shared his bed, his body, his silences, and his rare, cracked-open moments of something close to honesty. And I still don't know. A man who loves me would look like this. A man who owns me would look like this. The relief would be identical.
I thought I could find the difference. I believed that if I looked hard enough, if I studied him the way I study load-bearing walls and fractured foundations, I would find the structural truth underneath.
Still haven't found it.
His thumb traces a line across my knuckles, back and forth, slow. The simplest gesture in the world. My throat burns.
Under the table, my free hand goes to my stomach.
This. This is the reason I have to leave quietly.
Elio's hand squeezes mine across the table. Gentle. Like he's afraid I'll disappear if he holds too tight.
I squeeze back.
The worst goodbye is the one the other person doesn't know is a goodbye. It just feels like dinner.
I can't stay. Can't raise our child in a house with armed guards and marble floors and a grandfather who treats bloodlines like currency. Can't watch him kill the next Matt, and the one after that, and learn to eat breakfast in the room adjacent, the way wives of powerful men have been doing since the beginning of powerful men.
No.
Elio looks at me the way he looked at me in the study, open, unguarded, grateful, and it takes everything I have. Every single thing. Every wall I've built, and every breath I've measured, and every carefully neutral expression I've practiced in bathroom mirrors. All of it, everything, the full sum of Violet Quinn Murphy's capacity to endure, just to stand up and guide him to his bedroom.
24
VIOLET
The bedroom door clicks shut behind us, the sound so small, so ordinary, that it almost makes me laugh. Almost. Because this is it. The last hour I am giving myself before I stop being the woman Elio Marchetti thinks I am.
