It was only eight o'clock. He usually rolled in at dawn, smelling of cigar smoke and the back room of whatever establishment had required his attention. Sometimes he didn't come home at all. I'd learned not to ask. Asking was a weakness, and weakness in this house was something you wore alone.
He called out my name from the hallway. His voice echoed off the high ceilings, the marble floors, the emptiness that money can buy but cannot fill.
"Grazia."
I stayed quiet in the bedroom. The door was closed. The lights were off. I lay on my side with my hand still resting where the baby was, as if protecting something that I already knew I couldn't protect.
He didn't try again.
After a while, I heard the shower running. The pipes in the old estate groaned the way they always did. When he was done, he came into the bedroom without turning on the light. The mattress dipped as he slid in beside me.
Then I felt it. A warm sensation at my waist. His arm, wrapping around me from behind. His hand settling against my stomach.
It was the first time he'd held me like that. In three years of marriage, three years of sharing this bed and this name and this life, Simone Valente had never once pulled me close in the dark.
He buried his face in my neck. His breath was warm. He smelled like expensive soap and something underneath it. Guilt, maybe. If guilt had a scent, it would smell like Simone on the nights he tried to be kind.
"Oh, darling," he murmured. "Nothing happened between us. I just donated, okay? Silvana loves kids, you know that. Don't worry. Once the baby's born, I won't get in touch with her again. You understand, right?"
His voice was soft. Coaxing. The voice he used when he wanted something to go away quietly. I had heard him use it on associates who were about to be cut loose. On soldiers who had disappointed him but hadn't yet crossed the line that required a more permanent conversation.
I kept my eyes shut and my mouth closed.
His thumb moved against my hip. I could feel him waiting. Waiting for me to turn toward him, to soften, to give him the absolution he had come to collect.
I moved his hand away and turned my back.
The silence lasted three heartbeats. I counted them.
Then his voice changed. The softness drained out of it like water through a crack. "What else do you want, Grazia? I'm trying to be nice, and you're rejecting me?"