The prosecutor didn't come closer. He just stood at the edge of the lawn, hands in his pockets, like a man who'd bought a ticket to a show.

Dante didn't take his eyes off him.

"Marco. Keep him out there."

Then his fingers clamped around my wrist, and he pulled me through the French doors.

Bianca's voice chased us down the hall. "Dante? *Dante!*"

He didn't turn around.

The study door slammed behind us. Same leather chairs. Same whiskey on the cart. My photo used to sit on the corner of his desk. Now there was a crystal paperweight shaped like a heart.

He let go of my wrist and dragged both hands through his hair.

"What the hell are you doing, Rhea?"

"Coming home."

"You don't walk into my house in front of sixty people and—"

"*Your* house?" I rubbed the red marks his fingers had left. "I signed the mortgage too. Or did that get lost with my letters?"

He poured a drink. Didn't offer me one.

"You need to calm down."

"I'm calm. I've been calm for three years. You learn calm when the woman in the next bunk tries to steal your shoes."

He drank half the glass in one swallow.

"Tell me something," I said. "Does Bianca know she's the one who pulled the trigger? Or did you rewrite that for her too?"

The glass stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Keep your voice down."

"Why? Afraid your bride will hear?"

"Rhea."

"She was drunk, Dante. She grabbed your gun off the crate because that guy called her a whore. I was standing right there. I watched her do it."

His jaw worked side to side. He set the glass on the desk. Very gently, like it might go off.

"I know what happened."

"Then say it."

"It doesn't matter now."

"Say it."

He turned his back on me and stared out the window, at the white chairs, at his guests whispering into their champagne.

"Bianca shot him," he said. "Happy?"

I wasn't. I thought I would be. Instead my chest felt hollow, like someone had scooped it out with a spoon.

"You remember what you told me that night?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

"You said Bianca's father would talk. You said the Russos weren't family, they'd flip the second the cops leaned on them. You said only a wife could take it. 'Nobody squeals on a Moretti wife, baby. It shuts everybody up.'"

"It worked, didn't it?" He spun around. "Nobody talked. The Calabreses backed off. The family held together."

"And I held the bag."

"I kept you safe in there. You think nobody touched you by accident? I paid for that."

"You paid." I laughed, short and dry. "You said you'd come every Sunday. Every single week, you swore it. You know how many Sundays I sat in that visiting room with my hair done?"

"Rhea—"

"A hundred and fifty-six. I counted. I fixed my hair with a plastic fork."

His face shifted. For one second, he looked like the man who used to braid my hair badly on Saturday mornings.

Then it closed again.

"I couldn't be seen there. The feds were watching me. If I showed up, it looked like guilt."

"So you sent nobody. Not a lawyer, not a card. Not your mother."

"My mother died last spring."

That stopped me cold.

"Nobody told me."

"Would it have helped?"

I stared at him. Really stared. The new watch. The gray coming in at his temples. The wedding band, not mine, sitting fresh on the desk beside the whiskey, waiting to go on.

"What do you want from me, Dante?"

He exhaled, like he'd been waiting for that question. Like this part was rehearsed.

"I need you to stay somewhere else for a while."

"Excuse me?"

"The apartment on Mulberry. It's furnished. I'll have Marco bring the keys tonight."

"You're kicking me out of my own home."

"I'm asking you to give it time." He stepped closer and lowered his voice. "Bianca's pregnant."

The word hung there.

I didn't scream. I didn't cry.

I smiled.

"Congratulations."

He blinked, thrown. "Rhea, I'm serious. The doctor says she can't have stress. Seeing you here, it'll upset her. If anything happens to that baby—"

"Then what? You'll find someone else to take the blame?"

His nostrils flared. "That's not fair."

"Fair." I tasted the word. "Okay. Let me get my things."

"I'll have someone pack—"

"No." I was already at the door. "I'll do it myself. I'd hate to stress anyone."

---

The stairs creaked on the fourth step. That hadn't changed.

Everything else had.

The hallway used to be lined with our photos. Our wedding in Amalfi. Me laughing on his shoulders at Coney Island. Our first Christmas, both of us in ugly sweaters his mother knitted.

Now the walls were bare. Pale squares on the paint where the frames used to hang.

I pushed open our bedroom door.

The bedspread was new. Blush pink. I'd never owned anything blush pink in my life.

I crossed to the closet and yanked it open.

Empty.

No, not empty. Full of someone else. Lace robes. Cream sweaters. A row of tiny heels in sizes I could never squeeze into.

I checked the dresser. The drawers. The cedar chest at the foot of the bed where I kept my grandmother's quilt.

Nothing of mine. Not one sock.

The housekeeper had followed me up. She hovered in the doorway, wringing a dish towel.

"Where are my clothes?" I asked.

She wouldn't meet my eyes. "Ms. Russo had them taken out. Last year."

"Taken where?"

"Donation. Some of it… the trash."

"My grandmother's quilt?"

She swallowed. "I'm sorry, ma'am. I just started in June."

I nodded. Funny how calm my voice sounded. "Thank you. You can go."

She fled.

I turned toward the bed. My side. The left side, closest to the window, because I liked to wake up with the sun.

There was a silver frame on the nightstand.

Bianca, in profile, in a white slip dress. Both hands cupped under a round little belly. Soft lighting, flowers in her hair. The kind of photo people pay a lot of money for.

I picked it up.

The frame was mine. I'd bought it in Florence on our honeymoon. It used to hold a picture of Dante kissing me on the Ponte Vecchio.

I turned it over.

On the back, in Dante's slanted handwriting:

*My girls. Six months. I'll protect you both with everything I have.*

Six months.

I counted backward, the way I'd counted everything in Bedford Hills.

Then I set the frame down very carefully, face up, exactly where she'd left it.

Because the date written in the corner wasn't six months ago.

It was the week of my sentencing.

I didn't take the keys to Mulberry Street.

I took a cab to Bensonhurst instead, to the only Moretti who had ever told me the truth.

Uncle Aldo was Dante's father's older brother. Eighty-one, half blind, and still running numbers out of the back of a bakery on Eighteenth Avenue. He used to slip me cannoli when I was nineteen and too scared to speak at Sunday dinners.

The girl behind the counter waved me through. Aldo sat at a card table in the back, a cup of espresso by his elbow.

He looked up, and his cup hit the saucer so hard it cracked.

"Madonna."

"Hi, Zio."

He didn't stand. His hand found the edge of the table and gripped it, knuckles going white.

"You're dead," he said.

I almost smiled. "Prison food's bad, but it's not that bad."

"No." He shook his head, slowly at first, then faster. "No, I was there. I stood by the hole. I threw dirt on the box."

The room tilted.

"What box?"

"Yours." His voice went rough. "Dante called the family together in September. Said you got sick inside. Pneumonia. Said the prison buried the news because of a lawsuit. He did the whole thing. Mass at St. Finbar. Burial at Green-Wood."

"And nobody checked?"

"Who checks?" Aldo spread his hands. "The boss says his wife is dead, the family mourns. That's how it works. He cried, Rhea. In front of everybody. I never saw him cry since he was six."

I sat down in the chair across from him. I didn't decide to. My legs just quit.

"September," I repeated.

"The twentieth."

Six months ago. The same month the photo on my nightstand said Bianca was six months along.

He'd buried me so he could bury the scandal. A boss doesn't take a mistress. A widower takes a new wife.

"What section?" I asked.

Aldo's cloudy eyes searched my face. "Don't go there, bella."

"What section, Zio?"

He sighed and told me.

On the way out, I stopped at the hardware store on the corner. The man at the register rang up a claw hammer and didn't ask questions.

---

Green-Wood closed at five. I got there at four-fifteen.

The Moretti plot sat on a hill near the back. Dante's parents. His grandparents. A big marble angel with chipped wings.

And beside them, a new headstone. Black granite. Polished so bright I could see myself in it.

*RHEA MORETTI*

*BELOVED WIFE*

Under the words, set into the stone in a little oval of porcelain, was our wedding photo. Amalfi. Me in my mother's veil, him with his forehead against mine. Both of us laughing at something the photographer said.

Fresh lilies leaned against the base. Someone still came here.

I crouched and touched the letters. *Beloved*. The granite was cold and smooth, and somebody had paid a lot of money to make my name look that pretty.

"You picked lilies," I said to nobody. "I hate lilies."

The wind moved through the trees. I stood up.

I pulled the hammer out of the plastic bag.

The first swing caught the edge of the porcelain. It cracked down the middle, right between our faces.

The second swing shattered it.

The third sent white chips skittering across the grass like teeth.

I kept going. Over and over, until there was nothing in that oval but a jagged gray hole and my arms were burning and my breath came out in sobs I didn't recognize.

"Rhea!"

Tires spun on the gravel path below. A car door slammed.

Dante came up the hill at a run, tie gone, jacket flapping open. Marco trailed behind him, out of breath.

"Stop. *Stop!*"

He grabbed my arm mid-swing. I yanked free and turned on him with the hammer still raised.

He froze.

For a second, we just stood there. Him panting. Me shaking. The broken stone between us.

"Aldo called you," I said.

"He was worried."

"About me? Or about you?"

Dante's eyes dropped to the wreck of the headstone. His throat moved.

"Jesus, Rhea."

"You had a Mass for me." I laughed, and it sounded wet. "Did they play 'Ave Maria'? I always wanted 'Ave Maria.'"

"Put the hammer down."

"Did you give a eulogy? What did you say? 'She was loyal'? 'She'd do anything for me'?" My voice climbed. "Because that part's true. I did do anything. I did *everything*."

"I had no choice."

"You always say that."

"The feds were circling." He took a careful step toward me, palms out, like I was a dog that might bite. "Your case kept coming up. Reporters asking why the Moretti wife wasn't getting visits. If you were dead, the story died with you. It was cleaner."

"Cleaner." I tasted the word. "And Bianca? Was she cleaner too?"

His mouth tightened. "Leave her out of this."

"She's wearing my combs, Dante. She's sleeping on my side of the bed. She threw out my grandmother's quilt. Don't tell me to leave her out."

Marco cleared his throat behind him. "Boss, a groundskeeper's coming."

Dante didn't turn. His eyes stayed on me. They'd gone soft, the way they used to before he asked me for something.

"Come home with me," he said quietly. "Not Mulberry. Home. We'll figure it out. I'll fix this. I'll fix the paperwork, the records, all of it. Nobody has to know—"

"Nobody has to know what? That your wife is alive?"

"That I made a mistake."

I stared at him.

Then I did something that surprised us both.

I reached out and took his hand. His fingers were warm. They closed around mine on instinct.

I pressed the hammer into his palm and folded his fingers over the handle.

"Here," I said.

He looked down at it. Confused.

"You bought the stone. You should finish the job." I stepped back. "You're already a widower, Dante. You cried at my grave. You threw dirt on my box. So don't you dare come to me asking to be my husband."

His hand hung at his side, the hammer heavy in it.

"Rhea, if you walk away—"

"I already did. You just didn't notice. You were busy picking out lilies."

I turned and started down the hill.

Behind me, I heard him say my name once. Then nothing.

I was halfway to the gate when Marco caught up with me. He was pale, sweat on his upper lip, and he kept glancing back toward the plot.

"Rhea. Wait." He grabbed my sleeve and lowered his voice. "You need to know something before you go anywhere tonight."

"What?"

He swallowed hard.

"That box we buried in September?" he whispered. "It wasn't empty."