Chapter 9
He moved to the courtyard. The fig tree they had planted together in the first spring of their
narriage – she had chosen it, had knelt in the dirt in a white dress and laughed when he told her
she would ruin it, had pressed the roots into the soil with her bare hands and told him this tree
would outlive them both – had been ripped out by the roots. All that remained was an empty
hole in the earth, the soil dark and wet and raw, and the torn white threads of the root system
still clinging to the edges like fingers that had tried to hold on.
He stood at the edge of that hole and stared down into it, and the soldiers who had followed him
at a distance stopped walking and did not come closer.
The front hall. The hand-lettered verse she had written and framed for the entryway – a line from
heir wedding vows, rendered in her careful, beautiful script – had been taken down and
eplaced with something new, something generic, something that meant nothing. The nail holes
‘rom her frame were still visible in the plaster if you looked closely, but no one would look
closely. No one would know it had ever been there.
Every trace of her in this estate had vanished, as though she had never existed at all. As though
he house itself had conspired with her, had swallowed every fingerprint and every whisper and
thread of dark hair, and had closed over the space where she had been the way water
closes over a stone.
every
Ermanno Santoro stood in the front hall of his own compound, the separation documents
crushed in one fist and the Lovebird Token pressed against his chest with the other, and the
silence of the house settled over him like dirt over a coffin. His thumb found the embroidered
2/2
11:27
After I Learned His Love Was a Lie, I Disappeared
wing of the remaining lovebird through the fabric and pressed – pressed hard, the way a man
presses a wound to stop the bleeding – and he did not move, and he did not speak, and the
soldiers at the far end of the hall watched their Don stand perfectly still in the center of his
empire and understood, with the cold clarity of men who lived by violence, that something had
ust been destroyed that no amount of power on earth could rebuild.
How is this possible? Where are her things? The journals I wrote for her by hand?”
Why can’t I find any of it? Did you all hide them from me?!”
The household staff had never seen the Don like this. Not in the bloodiest sit-downs, not in the
worst years of the war with the Lombardis. Every last one of them kept their heads bowed,
shoulders drawn in, too terrified to speak. Two soldiers flanking the study doorway exchanged a
glance and then looked at nothing. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked into a silence so
dense it had weight.
Only Rosa answered, her voice trembling but her hands folded in front of her apron, left over
ight, thumbs pressed together. “Signora burned everything a few days ago…”
She said that hearts had already changed, so there was no point in keeping any of it.”
Ermanno doubled over as though the air had been punched from his lungs. His palm found the
edge of his desk and gripped until the knuckles went white. “A few days ago… she already
<new…”
How could she have known…”
Was it you?”
