She was trembling, tears streaming down her face. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a slow, deliberate motion, and when she spoke, her voice cracked in exactly the right places. "It's my fault. I never should have come to you for help. If I weren't so afraid my baby would grow up without a father, I'd never have degraded myself like this!" She turned her wet eyes toward the men gathered in the doorway, making sure every one of them could see. "Donna Rossetti, if you didn't want me and Tomasso to register the marriage and bring the baby into the Family name, then why did you pretend to agree and then turn around and try to force us out? Hitting me was one thing. But throwing a newborn on the floor?"
Her shrill sobs and accusations sent a chill through the room. The silence that followed was the particular silence of made men recalculating. I could feel it. The shift. The weight of judgment settling onto me like a physical thing, pressing the air from my lungs.
Everyone turned to look at me. "Giovanna, you..."
"Giovanna!"
Tomasso walked toward me with the baby in his arms and slapped me across the face.
The blow sent my vision black. I nearly passed out. The sound of it was worse than the pain. A sharp, flat crack that echoed in the small room, and behind it the absolute stillness of men who had watched their Don strike his wife and understood that no one was permitted to react.
I was already unsteady on my feet. My body crumpled and I hit the floor. My knees struck the cold tile first, then my palms, and the shock of it traveled up through my wrists and into my shoulders. The fluorescent light above me buzzed. Someone's shoe leather creaked. No one moved to help me.
The pain in my abdomen sharpened. I pressed both hands against my stomach, hard, while cold sweat beaded across my forehead and rolled down my temples. The room tilted. I could hear the baby crying, could hear Catarina's practiced sobbing, could hear the low murmur of the men by the door. All of it reached me as if through water.