Chapter 1 - THE EMPTY CHAIR
“Someone dressed like you should eat in the kitchen.”
Elena Romano said it without lowering her voice. Around the family table, conversation thinned, though the string quartet continued beneath the chandeliers. Beyond the ballroom windows, Lake Michigan reflected the city lights in long, broken lines.
I kept one hand on the back of my chair.
My dress was champagne-colored, plain except for a narrow fold at the waist. I had bought it before marrying her son. Three small bandages covered my right knuckles, and I had spent ten minutes in the powder room trying to conceal the bruising beneath them.
Elena looked at the bandages.
“The staff have prepared a perfectly adequate meal downstairs. You’ll be more comfortable there.”
Across the table, Gabriel’s uncle Vittorio glanced at my hand and stopped smiling.
That frightened me more than Elena’s words.
“The dress is clean,” I said.
“I wasn’t referring to cleanliness.”
Someone studied a wineglass. Someone else looked toward the bridal table, where Nicholas and Isabella were laughing with their photographer. I was grateful they hadn’t heard.
Six months earlier, I had become Mrs. Gabriel Romano in a quiet ceremony that felt more like the completion of a difficult negotiation. My father’s construction company had survived because of it. His employees had kept their jobs.
I had kept very little.
Gabriel had promised discretion, separate rooms, and freedom within his household. He remembered how I took my coffee. He noticed when I worked late. Once, during a storm, he moved a lamp closer to my chair without interrupting the book I was reading.
He had never said he wanted me there.
Now his mother was making the distinction public.
I looked at the place card beside my untouched champagne.
Mrs. Gabriel Romano.
I lifted it, folded it once, and placed it on the table.
“Of course.”
Elena returned to her conversation before I stepped away.
The kitchen was warm and loud. A dishwasher hissed, pans struck metal, and someone swore softly over a broken sauce. A young server saw my face and offered a chair near the pastry station.
“Do you need something, ma’am?”
“Just a minute.”
She brought water without asking again.
I wrapped my uninjured hand around the glass and looked at my phone. The threatening messages were still there.
You found something that doesn’t belong to you.
Then the second.
Your father still lives alone.
I had called him twice since morning. Both times, he had sounded puzzled but safe.
At the ballroom’s western entrance, Gabriel arrived twenty minutes late.
I did not see the conversations pause around him or the way his eyes moved immediately toward the family table. I did not see him find my empty chair and the folded card beside it.
What I saw, when I returned to the doorway, was my husband standing absolutely still.
His gaze was fixed on the silver displayed behind the bridal table.
Twelve antique pieces. The Romano crest. All reported missing the night before.
All recovered by me.
Gabriel turned toward the family table. His mother began to stand, smiling as though the evening had unfolded exactly as she intended.
Then he saw me.
His eyes dropped to my bandaged hand.
“Catherine.”
I stepped forward because every person between us had moved aside.
“What happened?”
“An accident.”
“Where?”
“Downstairs. With Arthur.”
Vittorio set down his glass.
Gabriel noticed.
For a moment, nobody spoke. Then my husband looked from the restored silver to my hand, and something in his expression changed.
“Who hurt my wife?”
May you like
Elena’s smile disappeared.
And Vittorio reached beneath the table for his phone.
