Godfather, Your Wife Is Done Waiting

I lay in the ambulance, blood running down my cheek. Just half an hour earlier, gunmen from a rival family had intercepted my car. My bodyguard had died in the driver’s seat, and I had crawled out through the shattered glass, one hand pressed over my still-flat stomach. Terrified, I called my husband’s private number again and again. He had promised me, “No matter what happens, if you call this number, I’ll answer.” But that night, he never did. Then a video appeared on my phone. Inside the heavily guarded Vitale estate, my husband was pinning a gold insignia onto another woman’s daughter. Every man who should have been protecting me that night had been sent there instead. In the video, the little girl tilted her head up and called him “Daddy.” My husband bent down and gathered them both into his arms. Behind him, bodyguards shielded them from the night wind. And I lay alone in an ambulance, waiting for a doctor to tell me whether the child inside me was still alive. After three years of marriage, I finally understood— Being the Godfather’s wife was only a title. His protection had never been mine. That night, I took off the ring that marked me as the lady of his family and placed it on top of the divorce agreement I had signed. Carrying a pregnancy no one knew about and the last of my dignity, I escaped his reach. Later, the man who had never bowed to anyone searched every port and interrogated everyone who had ever been in contact with me. But this time, no one could tell him where I was.