Chapter 12
On the surface, I savored the easy rhythm of life in a small southern town, the salt air off the
water, the unhurried mornings, the absence of armed men in hallways and whispered
conversations that stopped when I entered a room. In secret. I kept my ear to the around for
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After I Learned His Love Was a Lie, I Disappeared
news from the city.
After I left, Ermanno had gone west searching for me, tearing through the territories controlled by
allied and neutral families, calling in every debt the Santoro name could leverage. He crossed
nto the northern borderlands, the disputed mountain country where ambushes happened and
odies were left for the cold. He did not find a single trace. At one point his convoy was hit,
;upplies destroyed, and he nearly lost his life in the snow-covered passes. His soldiers pulled
im out half-frozen and bleeding, and he ordered them to keep searching before the blood on his
coat had dried.
He never thought to look south. I had always told him I despised the region because of my
nother’s death there. It was the one lie I had planted years before I ever needed it, the way a
voman married to a Don learns to plant things: early, casually, so deep that by the time it
natters, no one remembers it was planted at all.
pressed my thumb against the inside of my bare ring finger and watched Domenico sleep, and I
did not let myself think about the man in the northern mountains with my handkerchief pressed
gainst his chest like a wound that would not close.
He went west after that, chasing traces of me across vast, barren plains where the Santoro
iame still carried weight – through territories controlled by allied families, through towns where
I single phone call to the right capo could produce a name, a sighting, a rumor. He sent soldiers
nto every safehouse the Family maintained west of the Mississippi. He called in favors from
nen who owed him blood debts. He turned the western corridor inside out looking for a woman
vho had already vanished in the opposite direction.
t never occurred to him that I would go south.
Because I had told him once that I hated the south. My mother had been abandoned by my
ather in a crumbling parish house in the southern countryside, left to wither in the Gulf rain until
her heart gave out – not from disease, but from the slow, corrosive certainty that no one was
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After I Learned His Love Was a Lie, I Disappeared
coming back for her. I had told Ermanno this in the early years of our marriage, curled against
him in the dark of the master bedroom at the compound, and he had pressed his lips to my hair
and promised me I would never know that kind of loneliness. I had believed him. He had believed
me when I said I would never set foot in the south again.
So that is exactly where I went.
assumed his search was nothing more than a passing impulse, the territorial reflex of a man
who could not tolerate losing something that bore his name. I told myself that once he accepted
the reality of my departure – once the compound settled into its new silence and the household
staff stopped setting a place for me at the long dining table – he would give up. He would return
to Katarina. He would let the absence calcify into something he could live around, the way men
in his world always did.
But he searched for three years.
