Chapter 2

Luca and I had known each other since we were children.

My father was a cook at an Italian restaurant, and his was the most insignificant driver in the Moretti family. We lived in the same old apartment building on Chicago's South Side.

As a boy, he was always fighting.

Once, to get back my dance shoes after someone threw them in a ditch, he was beaten bloody by three boys taller than he was.

I cried as I cleaned his cuts.

He said, "Don't cry. As long as I'm around, no one gets to bully you."

At eighteen, I got into ballet school. Luca didn't go to college. He hauled cargo at the docks with a relative.

He worked by day and came to pick me up after class at night. In winter, when it was too cold, he tucked my dance shoes inside his coat to warm them.

At twenty-two, we were officially together.

By then he wanted to break away from the Moretti family and start a legitimate shipping company of his own. No one would lend him money. I sold the necklace my mother had left me and gave him everything I earned performing.

Our first office was an abandoned warehouse.

The roof leaked when it rained, and there was no heat in winter. I rehearsed by day, and at night I checked his books, answered the phone, and delivered documents to clients.

Luca often said that once the company made money, he would make it up to me.

The day the company landed its first big contract, he went down on one knee in the warehouse and proposed with a very cheap silver ring.

"Eve, once I stop making you suffer alongside me, we'll get married."

I said yes.

In those years, we really were poor. To save money, Luca often slept in the warehouse. After my performances I brought him leftover sandwiches, then helped him sort the next day's delivery orders.

The first time he met a major client, he didn't have a proper suit. I bought one at a secondhand shop and stayed up all night taking in the cuffs. The next day, that contract earned him his first real money.

He didn't buy himself a car. He booked an entire row at the theater where I performed. He brought every worker from the warehouse to watch me dance Giselle, and after the curtain he stood in the crowd and shouted, "That's my girlfriend!"

I thought then that as long as we stayed like this, it wouldn't matter if there was never a wedding.

Then the company got busier and busier. I started going to rehearsals alone, and he started carrying a gun when he went out. We moved into a big house, and never again shared a cold sandwich in the warehouse.

But that wait turned into six years.

First he said the company was just starting and he couldn't be distracted. Then the head of the Moretti family was killed, he was pushed to the front, and he had no choice but to take over the family business.

And then I had the accident.

He never mentioned the wedding again.

The next morning, Luca had a diamond necklace delivered as an anniversary gift.

Victoria brought it herself.

She wore a white suit and four-inch heels, not a hair out of place. While she stood there in the living room, I saw clearly for the first time that she and Luca lived in the same world.

A world of guns, money, ports, deals, and power.

A world I couldn't enter.

"Luca is busy, so he asked me to bring this." She set the box in front of me. "He didn't forget the anniversary on purpose last night. Something went wrong in our meeting."

"Your meeting moved to a hotel?"

She smiled a little and didn't deny it.

"The client we were seeing was staying there. Luca had a lot to drink, and I saw him to his room to rest. He was afraid you'd read into it, so he asked me not to say."

"How long were you in the room?"

"About two hours."

She looked at my pale face and added, deliberately, "Don't worry. I'll take good care of him."

I pushed the necklace box back.

"Take it."

"It's from Luca's heart."

"Then let him bring it himself."

Victoria bent down close to me.

"Eve, what he needs is someone who can help him, not someone who waits for him to come home every day. You saved his life, so he'll never abandon you on his own. But if you truly love him, you should think of him."

I raised my hand and slapped her.

She didn't get angry. She only held her cheek and laughed.

"You see? Besides losing your temper, what else can you do?"

After she left, I tried to stand up from the wheelchair on my own. With both hands braced on the armrests, I could still just lift my body. But there was no strength at all in my legs, and I fell to the floor the moment I left the seat.

My knees hit hard, and I felt nothing. That absence of feeling was exactly what frightened me.

I crawled to the full-length mirror and saw myself sprawled on the floor. Before the accident, I checked my arches, my knees, and the line of my shoulders in that mirror every day. Now the woman in it could barely sit up.

The caregiver tried to help me up. I refused. It took me twenty minutes to climb back into the wheelchair. Once I was settled, I called a former colleague from the ballet.

When the call connected, I heard the piano in the rehearsal hall. I hung up without saying a word.