Chapter 1

Three days before I woke up to all of this, Renato stopped eating my breakfasts.

His excuse: running late.

I didn't think much of it. I kept making them anyway. Three years of marriage had made it reflex.

Now I knew why he was in such a hurry. He was saving time to have breakfast with Noemi.

Noemi Vessi, the heroine of Sunshine Donna.

She was the kind of woman who lit up a room: vivid, warm, bursting with life at every seam.

The morning I first understood, I walked Renato to the door and watched his car pull out of the drive. I took a step forward, cupped my hands around my mouth, and called out:

"Renato, I love you!"

He waved without looking back and hit the gas.

Nothing.

The wind from his tires scattered dead leaves across the pavement, as if echoing an unspoken thought.

He'd changed.

I stood there in the sunlight, hollowed out.

I was three years old when I first saw him. It felt like lightning. I followed him home that day and made a scene, and the family laughed about it for years. I spent my entire childhood trailing after him like a second shadow.

When I was ten, I spent three thousand dollars at a charity lunch auction just to sit across from him for an hour.

At thirteen, I asked him to the spring dance. He said yes. I didn't sleep for a week.

At eighteen, the night of prom, after enough persistence that even I was embarrassed by myself, I finally kissed him.

At twenty-five, we stood before God and made our vows.

Everyone said we were a perfect match, a union of the Gatti family and the Milano family, two of the most powerful names on the East Coast.

I believed that. I believed it until the moment I woke up inside this story and understood the truth: it had always been one-sided. Whatever Renato felt for me was habit. Duty. The kind of feeling that grows in the space where real love never bothered to show up.

He was a ship with no engine. I was the wind that had been pushing him forward for twenty-five years.

Then Noemi walked in and changed everything.

She worked at his club, a bartender with skills that caught his attention. Her energy fascinated him. Admiration became attraction, and attraction became something more. But Renato remained physically faithful to me. What he shared with Noemi was nothing but platonic love.

A great love story always needs a villainess to make it burn.

And that villainess was me. Gianna Milano.

The plot called for me to discover the emotional affair and go to war against Noemi: petty cruelty, jealous rages, one humiliation after another, all of it making Noemi shine brighter by contrast.

Renato's contempt for me would grow until he handed me the divorce papers himself.

Then I'd run to my father, try to use the family to tear them apart.

Renato would outmaneuver me, dismantle the Milano organization, and deliver his final verdict personally.

A bullet, center of the forehead.

After that, he and Noemi would live happily ever after.

I came back to my senses and pressed my fingers to my brow. A faint, phantom pain bloomed there, as if the bullet had already chosen its destination.