The lighter was in his hand now. I hadn't seen him pick it up, but there it was, rolling between his thumb and forefinger in that slow, absent rhythm. Penny's lighter. The dead sister's keepsake, turning and turning while he stood in our kitchen holding another woman's underwear and deciding how little he needed to say.
Sensing my low mood, Dominic offered, "I can give you a ride to work today."
Seven years together, and not once had he driven me to work, no matter how bad the weather was. He always kept Family business and personal life separate. Those were his words. His rule. The line he drew so cleanly that I spent years believing it was principle instead of what it actually was: a way to keep me at a distance he could manage.
But Penelope? On her first day as his personal aide, she was already getting chauffeured by the Don of the Sloane family. The black armored sedan. The soldier holding the door. The whole performance of protection that I had never once been offered.
I pressed my thumb against the inside of my ring finger again. The bare skin. The absence.
"No need," I said. "I'll manage."
As I sat there turning over the difference between how Dominic treated his aide and the woman who had shared his bed for seven years, my fork slipped from my fingers and clattered against the tile floor. My hands were trembling when I bent to retrieve it.
By the time I straightened up, Dominic was already standing at the entrance of the kitchen, jacket on, keys in hand. He didn't look back.
"Something came up at the club. I'll give you a ride next time," he said, and the front door closed behind him before the sentence had fully settled in the room.
The two soldiers stationed outside the townhouse didn't acknowledge me when I left thirty minutes later. They never did. I was the Don's woman in name, which meant I existed in a category no one knew how to handle: not family, not civilian, not quite anything that had a protocol.
I limped into the back office of the Sloane import-export front on Mulberry Street. My desk sat in the narrow room behind the legitimate operation, where the real books lived. For some reason, every associate I passed that morning looked at me with something between pity and discomfort, the way men look at someone who's already dead but hasn't been told yet.