Tuesday. I reroute my morning walk through the kitchen because she's having tea at the counter with both hands wrapped around the cup and the morning light is catching the side of her face and I need to see it. Not want. Need. The distinction used to exist. It doesn't anymore.
I pour coffee I don't need. Stand at the opposite counter. She looks up. "Morning." Her voice is still rough with sleep and the sound of it lands in my stomach like warm liquor and I say "morning" back and my voice is normal and my chest is not.
Wednesday. She looks pale at breakfast. Doesn't eat the toast Marta set out. Her hand presses against her stomach — the gesture she does without thinking, the one that means the nausea is back.
I have a meeting with the Calabrese underboss at eleven. Important. The kind of meeting that secures supply lines for the next quarter.
I cancel it. Tell Luca to reschedule. He looks at me. I don't explain. I stay in the house and find reasons to pass through whichever room she's in — the study, the living room, the garden bench where she reads when the sun is right.
I'm not checking on her. I'm managing proximity to an asset. That's the lie I tell myself and the lie is getting thinner every day.
Thursday. I'm standing in the doorway of the living room watching her read. Her legs are tucked under her on the couch. The book is the one I left on her pillow — the fourth in the series. She's two-thirds through.
Her finger traces the page as she reads and her lips move slightly on certain words and I've been standing here for five minutes and I haven't moved and I don't know how five minutes passed because I could swear I just arrived.
Luca's voice behind me. "Boss."
I turn. His face is neutral. "The Bernardi paperwork needs your signature."
"Leave it on my desk."
He doesn't leave immediately. His eyes shift past me — to Sera on the couch, to my position in the doorway, to the distance between us which is the distance of a man who has been watching and doesn't want to be caught. He says nothing. He doesn't need to. The observation is the message.
I sign the paperwork in my study with my jaw locked.
Friday. She laughs.
Marta says something in the kitchen — I don't hear what, I'm on the phone with a port authority contact discussing container manifests — and Sera laughs.
Not the polite exhale she uses at dinner. Not the almost-laugh I've been collecting like evidence. A real laugh. Full. Bright. The sound fills the kitchen and spills into the hallway and reaches me in the study and my sentence stops. Mid-word.
The contact says "Don Morrante?" and I'm standing at my desk with the phone against my ear and my mouth open around a word I'll never finish because that sound — that laugh — has rearranged my chest so completely that I need a moment to remember what breathing is for.
"I'll call you back."
I hang up. Lean against the desk. Press my hand against my sternum where the rearranging is happening and think — this is a problem.
Not the laugh. Not her. The fact that I'm standing in my father's study pressing my hand against my own chest because a woman laughed in another room.
The fact that canceling meetings and rerouting mornings and standing in doorways for five minutes have become the architecture of my days. The fact that Luca sees it. That Marta sees it. That my uncle — wherever he is, planning whatever he's planning — is counting on exactly this.
No. Dante Morrante can’t be in love with his wife. I became too weak, too soft. I need to stop whatever feeling is forming inside me.
I pull back. Hard. Saturday I take dinner in the study. Sunday I speak to her in clipped sentences — yes, no, fine, ask Marta.
I see the confusion in her eyes. The flicker of hurt she tries to hide and doesn't quite manage. The retreat reads as rejection and I know it and I'm doing it anyway because every hour I spend close to her is another hour someone can use to calculate exactly how to destroy me.
My mother was loved. My mother was taken. The two events were not coincidental.
Monday she finds me in the hallway. "Did I do something wrong?"
The question hits the place between my ribs that she's colonized without permission. Her eyes are searching my face. Her hand is on her stomach.
She's wearing one of my shirts because hers don't fit right anymore and the sight of her in my clothes with my child growing under the fabric is so specifically the thing I swore I would never let myself feel that I have to look away.
"No."
"Then why are you…"
"I have work, Sera."
The sentence lands between us like a door closing. She stands there. I watch her process it — the dismissal, the distance, the wall going back up. She nods once. Turns. Walks away.
And I stand in the hallway watching her leave and the fourteen-year-old boy is satisfied and the thirty-year-old man is not and neither of them is winning and the house is full of her and I'm drowning in a room with no water.
Love in this world is a loaded gun someone else points at your head. I know this. My father's hollow eyes taught me this. My mother's absence taught me this.
But the gun is already loaded. And the safety has been off since the night she nodded in Nico's dining room and I realized I'd kill every man in the building if she said no.
The only question left is who pulls the trigger first.