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How can the woman everyone in Boston believes Domenico murdered be alive? She’s the ghost whose absence shaped every rumor about the DeLuca family I’ve ever heard. The dead wife whose memory hangs over my marriage like a shadow I’ve learned to live with.
“His… mom?” The words come out hollow. Disbelieving. “But she’s—”
“Alive.” Domenico’s eyes don’t leave mine. “She’s been alive the whole time.”
The room tilts. Not from the concussion—from the sheer weight of what he’s saying, the tectonic shift it creates in everything I thought I knew about him.
“This life wasn’t for Shirley. She wasn’t happy, and the only thing she wanted was to get out,” he continues. His voice is quiet. “She was unhappy for years, and once Paolo was old enough to understand, we arranged it and faked her death.”
“So why do people think you did it?” I ask, not sure I’m following.
Domenico takes my hand and brings it to his mouth, gently biting the pad of each finger before answering. “I planted that rumor,” he clarifies. “It was the easiest way to avoid people asking questions or looking for the truth.”
My other hand has gone still on his chest. I can feel his heart beating under my palm, steady and unhurried, while mine hammers against my ribs like it’s trying to escape.
“She lives outside Chicago now. In a small house with her new husband. Brian’s a decent guy who owns a hardware store. She teaches piano.” A pause. “Paolo visits her twice a year.”
“You let everyone believe you killed her.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s flat, distant, the voice of someone standing very still while the ground collapses beneath them.
“Yes.”
“Paolo knows.”
“Yes.”
“Gio knows.”
“Yes.”
“And you never…” I can’t finish the sentence. The words stick in my throat, too big, too impossible to shape.
Domenico’s hand finds my face. His palm is warm against my cheek, his thumb brushing just below my eye where the skin is tender from crying.
“I never killed my wife, Kira. She wanted a life without me, and I gave it to her.”
The simplicity of it is what breaks me. Not the conspiracy, not the years of secrecy, not even the fact that Domenico kept it secret from me.
Domenico DeLuca, the man everyone fears, the man rumored to have murdered his own wife, let the woman he loved walk away because she asked him to.
He let her go.
I have about a dozen questions running through my head, but Domenico’s phone rings before I can ask more. The sound cuts through the quiet of the hospital room like a knife, and I watch his face as he answers, the way his expression hardens into something focused and immediate.
“She’s here,” he says after a moment, pocketing the phone. He stands, adjusts his cuffs with that automatic precision that means his brain is already three steps ahead of his body. “Gio’s bringing her up. You don’t have to come if you’re not—”
“Oh, I’m coming,” I interrupt.
The words come out sharper than I intend. Domenico looks at me, his eyes doing that thing where they see more than I want them to, and he nods once.
“Okay.”
The hallway is too bright. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the smell of antiseptic and floor wax, the distant sound of monitors beeping behind closed doors. My head throbs in time with my heartbeat, the concussion making the world slightly too vivid, slightly too sharp at the edges.
Shirley is alive.
The thought repeats with each step, a mantra I can’t turn off. Shirley DeLuca… wait, is that even her name anymore? Probably not. Either way, the supposed dead wife is alive. She’s in this hospital. And I’m about to meet her.
As Domenico wraps his arm around me, I lean into the touch. The rational reason is that my legs feel like they’re made of something that isn’t quite solid. But the real reason is that… he’s my husband, and I love him.
