Alle Kapitel von The CEO's Dirty Secret: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 10

The gremolata had to go on last. Elena had learned that at nineteen, standing on a stool beside Aldo's wife in the back room of the atelier, chopping parsley finer than the leaves of it, and it was still true at twenty-three in a kitchen the size of the atelier's whole front room. Parsley, lemon zest, garlic, crushed together with the flat of the knife. She folded it into the osso buco at five to six, tasted the sauce, and closed her eyes for one second.It was right.The table was set by seven. His plate at his place, the good silver, two candles she had bought that morning from the shop on Via Solferino because the woman there wrapped them in tissue like they were treasure.The dress he liked, the green one, taken out of its garment bag at lunchtime and hung on the wardrobe door where he would see it when he came in. Card on his plate, unsigned outside. She had written her name inside and then a line she now half-regretted: *Three years. Everything I have, I gave on purpose.* It had

The shower came on at six forty.She knew every sound of that bathroom by heart: the pipes' complaint, the click of the cabinet, the particular slap of his phone being set on the marble shelf, face up, safe from steam. Three years of late arrivals had taught her the whole liturgy. She stood at the dining table in the green dress with the robe over it and waited for it to end.He came out knotted and fresh, cuffs aligned, a suit bag over his arm. Como, the buyers' mill, back tomorrow. He crossed the living room reading his phone, and his eyes passed over the cold table, the burned-down candle, the silver cloche, and came off his phone for none of it."Matteo."He stopped. She turned the photograph face up and set it in the middle of the cloth, between the candle stub and his place, and asked him the one question she had chosen at five in the morning, the only one that mattered."Who is she?"He looked at the photograph the way a man looks at a bill he has already contested by email. Th

Waking in an expensive room is a sound: nothing.No traffic came up to the twelfth floor. No fridge hummed, no pipes complained, no city leaked in past the glass. Elena lay with her eyes shut in that absolute quiet and let her body file its report. Headache, medium. Stomach, wrong. Feet, one bruised where the heel had snapped. Otherwise, nothing. No marks, no aches that told any story she'd have to stand in daylight and own.She opened her eyes on a ceiling she did not know.Noon light, tall windows, a room the color of weak tea and honey. She was in the bed under a coverlet that weighed like an opinion, in a shirt that was not hers, pressed cotton, too big, smelling faintly of cedar. Across the room, over the back of a chair, her dress from the night before hung with a care she had not given it. The broken shoes stood together at the foot of the bed, toes aligned.Somebody had done that. She had not.The memory arrived the way weather arrives, all at once and from behind. The bar. Th

There are forty-nine mornings in six months, and on the first of them Elena sat on the edge of the bed with the ledger open on her knees and did the only mathematics that had ever interested her.Three jobs were already sold. The tailor's mornings, the workshop's afternoons, Da Gigi's nights, plus Sundays at the bar now too, because Gigi's owner had shrugged when asked and shrugged again when she thanked him. Sunday double shifts bought her ninety more euros a week and cost her the last of her mornings.She wrote it all down. Hours against euros, euros against months, months against the doctor's deadline. The arithmetic had a hole in it the exact size of a valve.Work harder, the numbers said, and you arrive three months late with a mother who can't climb stairs and a hundred and something euros of difference. There is no version of four jobs, the ledger said, in its flat unpitying hand, where four jobs is enough. It takes what it takes or it takes her.The banks were a tour of polite

The surgeon's office set the date on a Tuesday morning: the second of May, six a.m. admission, deposit due in seven days.The eviction notice was in her letterbox by lunchtime.Rosa was on the stairs when Elena got home, keys in fist, coat already on, and she said it before the door was open. "The building's sold. Not my doing, I own nothing but my opinions. You have until the first of May.""The first of May.""The new people want it empty. They want everything empty. There's a crane on the canal now, you've seen it." Rosa looked at her, at the three months of paid rent she'd have no use for, and did the unusual thing, the human thing, and gave it back. "I'll return the overpay tomorrow. You'll want it liquid."Seven days for a deposit. Twenty-three for a home. Both clocks ran in the same direction, and neither ran fast enough.The war council was at Da Gigi, after close, on napkins, because Sofia did her best arithmetic on napkins and her worst on actual paper."Options." Sofia wrot