Chapter 2
That was how it began.
She should have called for help.
Instead, she sat him on an overturned milk crate, opened the old first-aid cabinet, and discovered the wound was a deep graze rather than the catastrophic injury she had first feared.
“You need stitches.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That’s not an argument.”
His mouth twitched.
“Do you always boss injured strangers around?”
“Only when they break into my kitchen.”
“I didn’t break in.”
“You entered through a locked rear door.”
“It wasn’t locked.”
Chloe frowned.
Arthur looked toward the damaged latch.
“It is now broken.”
She gave him a look.
“So you broke in.”
“Technically.”
She learned his name twenty minutes later.
Not his occupation.
Not the Romano family.
Not the properties, nightclubs, shipping companies, construction contracts, or rumors that surrounded him.
He told her he was Arthur.
She told him she was Chloe.
For one strange hour, that was enough.
He returned the next night.
No blood.
No suit.
Just jeans, a black sweater, and an offer to pay for the broken lock.
“You owe me for the tomatoes too.”
“I didn’t damage the tomatoes.”
“You emotionally disturbed them.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then smiled.
Arthur kept returning.
Sometimes after midnight.
Sometimes before the breakfast crowd arrived.
Never with an entourage.
At Henderson’s, he sat in booth seven and drank coffee from chipped white mugs like everyone else.
Chloe had spent most of her life watching women become smaller around certain men.
She refused to.
That intrigued him.
Her body had always entered rooms before she did.
She was soft and full-figured, with hips that department stores seemed determined not to design jeans for and a stomach she had spent too many years hiding beneath loose cardigans.
Arthur noticed when she tugged at her sweater.
One night in her apartment, when she turned away while changing, he caught her hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re hiding.”
Chloe laughed without humor.
“You date women who look like they survive on bottled water and resentment.”
“I don’t date them.”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“Pictures are business.”
She looked at him.
He stepped closer.
“I come here because this is the only place where nobody wants anything from Arthur Romano.”
“You think I don’t want anything?”
“What do you want?”
Chloe considered it.
“Honesty.”
That answer changed his face.
Because honesty was the one thing Arthur Romano could not safely give her.
He kissed her instead.
Their relationship existed in stolen hours.
A late breakfast after he spent the night.
A walk beside Lake Michigan before sunrise.
Sunday evenings in her tiny living room with Arthur’s expensive shoes abandoned beside a thrift-store coffee table.
He never explained why he sometimes disappeared for three days.
Chloe never asked why men in black SUVs occasionally watched the diner from across the street.
She knew enough to know he was dangerous.
She also knew the version of Arthur who helped her brother fix a refrigerator compressor.
The Arthur who remembered she hated pickles.
The Arthur who once drove forty minutes at two in the morning because she had texted that the pipes were making a weird noise.
That was the problem with loving someone dangerous.
Eventually, you stopped seeing only what they could do to other people.
You began believing they would never do it to you.
Then Arthur vanished.
No argument.
No warning.
No goodbye.
His private number stopped working.
The black sedan no longer appeared three blocks from the diner.
His coat disappeared from the hook beside Chloe’s apartment door.
For six days, she told herself something had happened to him.
On the seventh, she learned the truth on television.
Arthur Romano stood beneath the gold lights of the Lakeshore Grand Hotel beside Vivien Croft.
A reporter called it an engagement that would unite two of Chicago’s most powerful private business dynasties.
Vivien smiled.
Arthur did not.
Chloe sat on the edge of her bed holding the pregnancy test she had taken twenty minutes earlier.
Two pink lines.
She watched Arthur put a ring on another woman’s hand.
Then she went into the bathroom and threw up.
She called him until his old number disconnected completely.
She wrote a letter.
Then another.
She drove once to Romano Tower, made it to the lobby, and lost her nerve after seeing men watching the entrance.
Pride did the rest.
If he wanted Vivien Croft, Chloe would not beg.
If she had to raise her child alone, she would.
She sold her old car.
Moved from her apartment into the small rooms above the diner.
Worked until her ankles swelled.
And at twenty-eight weeks, after a frightening appointment, she was ordered to stop.
“Your blood pressure is much too high,” Dr. Melissa Grant told her.
Chloe sat on the examination table twisting a tissue between her fingers.
“How high is too high?”
“High enough that I don’t want you working twelve-hour shifts.”
“I own a diner.”
“Then your diner is about to learn independence.”
Chloe tried to smile.
May you like
Dr. Grant didn’t.
“I’m serious. Headaches, flashing lights, sudden swelling, pain under the ribs—any of those happen, you call me immediately. If the pressure worsens, you could have seizures. The baby could be in danger too.”
