Chapter 8
He had laughed. He had pulled her closer and kissed the crown of her head and told her she was
being dramatic, that she watched too many films, that he would never give her a reason. And
she had gone quiet against his chest, and he had mistaken her silence for comfort.
He had never imagined that his gentle, sweet-tempered wife could be so absolute. She had even
eft him formal separation documents – not filed through a Family lawyer, not negotiated
through intermediaries, but drawn up cleanly, precisely, with the kind of legal clarity that
suggested she had been planning this for longer than he wanted to consider. In this world, a wife
did not leave a Don. A wife endured. A wife looked away. A wife lit candles and praved and
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After Learned His Love Was a Lie | Disappeared
suggested she had been planning this for longer than he wanted to consider. In this world, a wife
did not leave a Don. A wife endured. A wife looked away. A wife lit candles and prayed and
olded her suffering into the linens and carried on. Gioia had looked at every one of those
unwritten rules and set them on fire.
No.” The word came out hoarse, cracked down the middle. “Gioia would never bear to leave me.”
He was speaking to himself. Rosa said nothing. The soldiers said nothing. The house said
lothing.
I only made the same mistake every man makes.” His voice dropped to something barely
audible, something that sounded like a man trying to talk himself back from the edge of a
building. “How could it come to this?”
Ermanno refused to believe that Gioia had truly cast him away. He moved back through the
estate with the desperate, systematic violence of a man dismantling his own life one room at a
ime, searching for some trace that she had been there, some proof she still existed in this
house. He ransacked the master bedroom – tore open drawers, swept his arm across the top of
her vanity, sent bottles of perfume crashing to the marble floor where they shattered and
eleased the ghost of her scent into the air, jasmine and bergamot, and the smell of it nearly
buckled his knees.
He turned nearly every inch of the compound upside down and found nothing. Not a single thing
hat belonged to her. Not a hairpin. Not a glove. Not a prayer card from the chapel alcove. She
had been methodical. She had been thorough. She had moved through this house like a woman
erasing herself from a photograph, and she had not missed a single detail.
He stormed into the study, where the leather chairs still held the shape of the men who had sat
n them during last week’s sit-down, where the humidor still breathed its slow cedar breath into
he room. The portrait of her that had hung above the fireplace – commissioned the year of their
marriage, Gioia in a dark dress with her hair down, her eyes holding something private and
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–
luminous that the painter had somehow caught was gone. The hook remained. The wall
behind it was a shade lighter than the surrounding plaster, a perfect rectangle of absence, like a
wound that had not yet learned to scar.
