Chapter 7
n the end, all he could do was seize Rosa by the arm in the main hallway, his eyes bloodshot,
he veins in his temples visible beneath skin that had gone the color of old parchment. His grip
vas hard enough to bruise, and Rosa did not flinch. She had served this house for eleven years.
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After I Learned His Love Was a Lie, I Disappeared
She had seen worse hands than his.
Where is my wife?” His voice was barely controlled, a low rasp scraping the bottom of his
hroat. “Where did she go?”
Rosa stood very still. Her hands were folded in front of her apron – left over right, thumbs
›ressed together – and the pressure between those thumbs was the only indication that she
vas containing something enormous behind the plain, weathered architecture of her face. She
eld the position for a long moment. Then her hands unfolded.
She drew a pair of formal separation documents from the pocket of her apron, and beside them,
à handkerchief – hand-embroidered, the lovebirds stitched in thread so fine it caught the hallway
ight like filament. The matched Lovebird Token. One of a pair. His and hers, from before the
blood and the power, from when they were just two people who believed the world would leave
hem alone.
–
Rosa’s voice was raw when she spoke. Years of silence – years of watching, of folding her
hands, of pressing her thumbs together and saying nothing had given the words a weight that
—
nade the soldiers at the far end of the hallway lower their eyes.
The signora is gone.” Rosa held the documents and the handkerchief out to him, and her hands
fid not shake. “She ordered me to return these to you. She said you broke your promise, but she
always remembered hers.”
The hallway was silent. Somewhere deep in the house, a clock ticked.
She said not to look for her. Not in this life or the next shall you see her again.”
Ermanno took the Lovebird Token. His hands trembled as his fingers traced the embroidery –
he two birds, heads inclined toward each other, stitched in a time when his hands had been
steady and his promises had meant something. When they had pledged themselves to each
ther they had each woven a lock of their hair into the fabric of the matched nair braided into
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After I Learned His Love Was a Lie, I Disappeared
other, they had each woven a lock of their hair into the fabric of the matched pair, braided into
the thread beneath the birds’ wings. A blood oath would have been easier to break. Hair woven
nto silk was permanent. It was a promise made with the body, not the mouth.
–
Now hers was gone. The thread where her dark hair had been braided was cut clean – not torn,
not ripped in haste, but severed with scissors, deliberately, the way a surgeon cuts a suture. Only
is remained, a single lonely thread still woven into the lovebird’s wing, and the absence of hers
beside it was louder than any word Rosa had spoken.
He stood in the hallway of his own estate, the most powerful man on the eastern seaboard, a
Jon whose name made federal prosecutors lose sleep, and he held a handkerchief with one
hread of hair in it and could not breathe.
And only then did he remember the words she had whispered to him in the heat of their love —
years ago, in the bedroom upstairs, her body warm against his, her mouth close to his ear, her
voice carrying the quiet certainty of a woman who has already imagined the worst and made her
Deace with it.
Ermanno, if you ever betray me, I will make sure you never find me.
