Page 10 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

He crouches.

This man, who has never once in his life made himself smaller for anybody, goes down on one knee on wet asphalt in a coat worth more than my car. He catches my daughter. One big hand comes up to cradle the back of her head, and for about four seconds his whole face turns into somebody I used to know.

Somebody who once fell asleep with his hand flat on my stomach, because the baby had hiccups and he wanted to feel them.

How am I supposed to watch that from forty feet away and stay standing?

Then he stands, and it closes, and he looks over her head at a spot in the middle distance about a foot to the left of me.

Why a foot? Why not just look? Would it cost him something?

“Forty minutes,” I call out. My voice comes out perfectly normal, which is the only real skill I’ve developed in my thirties.

He doesn’t answer. He never does. He takes Rica’s hand and turns for the glasshouse, and she’s already talking, because she gets that from me.

But he’s got to pass my side of the car to get there.

I know it’s coming. I get four or five seconds to prepare, which is four or five seconds more than I need in order to completely fail.

He comes down the length of my car with my daughter chattering at his hip. The closest he gets is maybe an arm’s length.

I can smell him.

That’s the part nobody warns you about. Not the money, not the lawyers, not the eight years.

The smell of a man’s coat in cold air. Your own body going oh, there you are, like an idiot. Like a dog at a door.

My hands won’t behave. I shove them in my pockets.

He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t slow down. But as he passes, his stride goes wrong—barely anything, half a beat where his weight hesitates.

Then it’s fixed. He walks on. And I’m left there wondering whether I imagined the whole thing because I wanted it.

They get about twenty yards out. I make myself look away from his back, which takes more effort than I’m prepared to admit to.

That’s when I catch it.

The car window. My own reflection, and past it, in the glass—him, half-turned, looking straight at me.

Eight years of a foot to the left, and the second my back is turned he looks.

My stomach drops out of me. I don’t turn around. I just stand there with my heart going like something trapped, thinking: so you do know where I am, then. You’ve always known exactly where I am.

Then a white van comes tearing down the ramp with its side door already sliding open.

At first I notice it the way you notice weather. Then two men throw themselves out of it while it’s still moving. They hit the asphalt at a dead sprint, coming straight up the middle of the lot.

They aren’t running at me.

“RICA!”

I don’t remember getting out from behind the car.

I think I’m screaming. I’m not sure. Everything’s gone slow, slow and so loud, and my flats are sliding on the wet and there’s a man’s arm swinging out towards my baby and I can’t—I can’t breathe, I can’t get there, no, please, not my baby—

Marcello whirls so fast his coat cracks in the air behind him. He rips Rica off her feet mid-stride and slams her in behind his legs, and he doesn’t look big now.

He looks like his father’s son. Like every photograph in that house I was never allowed back into.