Chapter 3

For three months, Dante refused to sign anything.

He sent flowers, then specialists, then his longtime lawyer with a speech about what a divorce would do to our family. He knelt by my bed for three nights until I moved into the guest room and locked the door.

I filed anyway.

While his attorneys stalled, I gathered records. The delivery note. Photographs of my bruises. The reporter's original video. A copy of an adoption consent bearing a signature that looked like mine until you knew how I formed the H in Hart.

I slept when I could. Took my medication. Kept every appointment.

He called those things progress.

I called them preparation.

When I took Sofia to stay with an old colleague outside the city, I told him she was safe and offered a supervised visit. I didn't give him the address.

That night, he drank until his assistant found him vomiting blood.

At the emergency department, he caught my wrist before they wheeled him through the doors.

“Don't do this to us.”

Then I remembered him turning away while his bodyguards shoved me to the ground.

“Will Sofia be the next thing you give her?”

His grip loosened.

“Never.”

“You said I was safe with you.”

He had no answer.

I stayed until the doctor said he was stable. Then I left.

By morning, he'd discharged himself and was waiting outside the house in yesterday's shirt.

“I'll sign,” he said. “Just let me see my little girl.”

We sat at opposite ends of the dining table where we'd once argued cheerfully about nursery colors.

He offered me the house, the island, accounts I hadn't known existed.

“I don't care about any of it. Take everything.”

Then he slid the settlement toward me.

I read every page.

At the bottom of the final section, his attorney had inserted a condition: the parties would proceed only if both reaffirmed consent after thirty days. Either could withdraw from that settlement before the final hearing.

It wouldn't prevent a divorce forever. But it would put me back into the fight he'd spent three months financing.

He saw a month in which he could win me back.

I saw another door he intended to lock.

My attorney had already prepared an alternative. The hearing date was reserved. The financial terms could remain, but his signature would authorize counsel to submit the settlement and proceed on the scheduled date without another personal appearance from him. Any later challenge would have to go through the court.

I laid the corrected version before him.

“This is the copy we sign. Every page.”

“Fine.” He was watching the doorway. “Anything. Where's Sofia?”

“Read it.”

“I trust you.”

I waited while he initialed each page. His own lawyer received the executed copy. I kept the signed original.

Only when the documents were secured did our housekeeper bring Sofia in.

“Daddy!”

She ran to him, arms open, hair coming loose from the braid I'd made that morning.

He folded around her as though someone had handed him his heart.

I crouched beside them.

“Your ribbon's coming undone, sweetheart.”

She ducked behind his shoulder.

“Daddy can do it.”

My hand stopped in the air.

When my depression had been worst, I'd sometimes shut myself in the bedroom until the panic passed. There had been crying she could hear through the door. A glass I'd dropped. Days when her father did bedtime because I couldn't stop shaking.

She didn't know I went away so she wouldn't have to carry any of it.

She only knew I went away.

Dante stroked her back.

“Mommy and I might live in different houses soon.”

Sofia looked up.

“Can we live at Vivi's? With Luca?”

The room went quiet.

I stood slowly.

“You've been taking her there.”

“Elena—”

“How long?”

He looked at Sofia instead of me.

“She likes having someone her own age.”

“Her twin brother.”

Sofia pressed her cheek to his chest.

“Please don't be cross.”

I wanted to break every glass in that room. Instead, I sat down so I wouldn't be towering over her.

“I'm not cross with you.”

“Vivi says your head hurts when I make too much noise.”

I closed my eyes for a second.

“She says I should let you rest. And she never gets sad at bedtime.”

Dante made a small, impatient sound.

“She was trying to help.”

“By telling my daughter she's a burden to me?”

Sofia began to cry. I lowered my voice immediately.

“You're not a burden. You never have been.”

She pulled a folded sheet from her backpack and handed it to Dante.

It was a drawing for preschool family day. Four figures under an enormous yellow sun. Dante. Vivienne. Luca. Sofia.

My daughter's family, in purple crayon.

No space left for me.

“Vivi helped with the names,” she explained. “Can she come to school? I already told Miss Amy.”

Dante studied the drawing.

“Mommy should be in this too.”

Sofia's mouth trembled.

“But Vivi said you'd be tired.”

He could have corrected that. Could have told her that being ill wasn't the same as not wanting her.

Instead, he looked at me.

“Give her time, Elena. She doesn't understand.”

I knew exactly who didn't understand.

I looked at the little girl gripping the picture, terrified that she'd done something wrong by believing the adults she'd been taught to trust.

“Vivi can go,” I said.

Relief softened her whole face.

That hurt more than anger would have.

Thirty days, I reminded myself as Dante carried her upstairs.

Thirty days until he could no longer call this love and require me to agree.