Page 20 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

“I’ve sorted out the school,” his wife said.

Then she talked for a full minute without once stopping. A teacher called Mrs. Hunt, telephoned at half past seven. A family emergency. Work sent out every Monday. Half the class had chickenpox anyway, so the child would miss nothing.

There was a timetable, too. Maths and reading in the mornings. Cursive on Wednesdays, which his daughter would hate.

She set the envelope down on the corner of his desk. Her hands weren’t steady, so she gripped her own elbows to stop them.

“Are you homeschooling?”

“It’s the best way to keep her safe, but also keep her life as normal as possible.”

He waited for her to say something else. Again, she surprised him.

Their daughter had come round the side of a van at a dead run because the child’s father had a name. Chisa herself had been dragged out of her own life, locked behind gates she hadn’t chosen, and still she didn’t blame him at all.

“Thank you.”

The words came out rough, perhaps even eight years too late because he had never thanked her for being a good mother to Rica. And yet, Chisa being Chisa...

“Oh—don’t.” She was visibly flustered and close to squirming on her feet. “You don’t thank somebody for that. She’s my daughter, I’d do it if we were living in a tent.”

“She is ours,” Marcello said.

It was out of his mouth before he’d decided to say it. She went so still, and so pink, that he had to look back down at his desk.

She went out of his study without another word. Marcello sat looking at a padded envelope full of a seven-year-old’s spelling work for a very long time.

The day went the way the days went now. The gates stayed shut. The men on the lawn changed at two, then again at ten.

In the afternoon he passed the kitchen door and heard his daughter arguing about the letter R, and his wife laughing. He did not go in.

She asked me nothing.

That was what wouldn’t leave him alone.

Any other woman alive would have stood in that study and demanded to know what was happening, who those men were, why there were guns on the lawn of the house she’d been driven to. His wife had not asked one question. She had gone away and built a timetable instead.

It was the same woman who’d married him. That was the trouble. Eight years and a folder full of proof, but she was still the girl who cried in a stockroom over a bracelet that wasn’t hers.

By eleven the house was quiet, and Marcello was on the landing outside the yellow room.

He had not decided to be there. That was the first lie he told himself that night.

The child had asked for the arrangement—both of them, one on each side, the way it had been the night before. She’d asked at breakfast with her mouth full of toast and no idea that she was asking two people to lie three feet apart for nine hours in the dark.

He’d have refused anything else on earth. He could not refuse his daughter that.

So there was a reason to be standing on this board at eleven at night.

That was the second lie.

He knocked on nothing, opened the door, went in.

“Where is she?”

The lamp on the landing threw a long stripe of light into the room. His wife sat up in the middle of the bed with her hair loose and her glasses off.

It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.