Chapter 1
“You let me bury you,” I said.
“I know.”
“You let me stand here every Sunday.”
His eyes flicked toward the grave.
Something moved across his face.
Regret, perhaps.
But I had spent six months inventing expressions for a dead man. I no longer trusted myself to interpret his.
“Were you watching me?”
“Not every week.”
The answer hurt more than a denial would have.
I stepped backward.
Nicholas immediately stopped speaking.
“You were.”
“From a distance.”
“Why?”
“I needed to know you were safe.”
A bitter laugh escaped me.
“Safe?”
He looked down.
For all the stories people told about Nicholas Moretti, I had rarely seen him uncertain. He had always seemed to know which door to open, which call to make, which problem could be solved and which one simply had to be endured.
Now he looked like a man standing before the one problem he had no idea how to solve.
Me.
“My car is near the south gate,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to come with me. But there are things you deserve to see.”
“Things?”
“Documents. Messages. Everything I should have told you before.”
I glanced at the headstone.
Nicholas followed my gaze.
“That grave is empty,” he said.
I closed my eyes.
Of all the details, that one struck deepest.
Empty.
I had brought flowers to an empty grave.
I had knelt beside an empty grave.
I had told an empty grave that I blamed myself for not answering Nicholas’s last telephone call.
“You knew,” I whispered.
“Knew what?”
“That I thought it was my fault.”
His expression changed.
“I didn’t.”
“The night of the explosion, you called me three times.”
“I remember.”
“I was angry with you.”
He said nothing.
“We had argued that morning. You said you might not be home for dinner again. I told you I was tired of living according to your schedule.”
“You had every right.”
“I ignored your calls.”
“Claire—”
“I spent six months thinking that maybe you were calling because you needed me.”
He took one involuntary step forward, then stopped himself.
“I wasn’t.”
The rain softened around us.
I opened my eyes.
“What?”
“I wasn’t calling because I was in danger.”
“Then why?”
His answer came slowly.
“To tell you I was leaving.”
The cemetery seemed to tilt.
“What do you mean, leaving?”
“That is one of the things I need to explain.”
I stared at him until the cold finally reached my hands.
My fingers had gone numb around the umbrella I had forgotten to open.
Nicholas noticed.
He removed his coat.
“No.”
“I’m not trying to—”
“I said no.”
He put it back on.
The old Nicholas would have argued. Or perhaps I had only believed that because I had spent years mistaking certainty for strength.
This Nicholas nodded.
“My car is there,” he repeated. “If you want the truth.”
I looked toward the gate.
Then at the empty grave.
Something inside me shifted.
Not forgiveness.
Not trust.
Only a decision.
“Your car,” I said. “Not my house.”
He nodded once.
“My car.”
We walked separately.
Ten feet between us.
Then eight.
Then twelve again whenever he unconsciously moved closer.
Near the gate stood a dark blue sedan I did not recognize. No driver waited beside it. No men in black coats watched from another vehicle.
Nicholas opened the passenger door.
I climbed in without thanking him.
He drove.
For the first ten minutes, neither of us spoke.
Chicago passed beyond the rain-streaked windows in familiar pieces—brick apartment buildings, corner stores glowing against the gray afternoon, trees bent beneath the weather.
I kept looking at Nicholas’s hands on the steering wheel.
Alive hands.
A ridiculous thought.
But grief had reduced him to objects.
His watch in my dresser drawer.
His shirts in garment bags.
His fountain pen in the desk.
The ceramic coffee mug with a chipped handle that I could not bring myself to throw away.
Now his thumb tapped once against the steering wheel at a red light.
I remembered that habit.
He always did it when he was worried.
“Where are we going?”
“A house in Lincolnwood.”
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
I turned sharply.
He corrected himself.
“Temporarily.”
“You have a house.”
“I rented it through an attorney.”
“For how long?”
“Four months.”
The number lodged beneath my ribs.
“So for two months after you died, where were you?”
“Wisconsin. Then Indiana.”
“Doing what?”
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
His jaw tightened.
“For people to believe I was dead.”
I looked away.
There it was.
The sentence that belonged to the man newspapers had written about.
The man I had married but never completely understood.
Yet when I looked back, he did not appear proud of the deception.
Only tired.
The house in Lincolnwood was small and unremarkable, with pale siding and a narrow porch. No gate. No security cameras that I could see. A child's bicycle leaned beside the neighboring garage.
Nicholas unlocked the door.
Inside, the living room contained a sofa, two lamps, a plain wooden table, and almost nothing personal.
Except photographs.
I stopped.
There were four on a shelf.
Our wedding.
A picture of me asleep on the sofa with my feet tucked beneath Nicholas’s leg.
His mother, Sofia, laughing beside a birthday cake.
And one taken in Door County three summers earlier.
Nicholas and I stood near the water.
My hair blew across my face.
He was looking at me instead of the camera.
“You brought pictures.”
“I had copies.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know.”
He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with two glasses of water.
I did not take mine.
“Start talking.”
He sat across from me.
For a moment, he seemed to consider where six months of lies should begin.
Then he said, “My father left me something when he died.”
I frowned.
Nicholas rarely spoke about Carlo Moretti.
I had met his father only twice before the heart attack that killed him. Carlo had been an imposing man with an unexpectedly gentle way of asking whether I wanted more coffee.
“What?”
“Records.”
“What kind?”
“Financial records. Property transactions. Companies. Payments.”
“To whom?”
Nicholas leaned forward.
“People who had no business receiving them.”
I understood enough of his world to understand what he was not saying.
“Illegal payments?”
“Yes.”
May you like
“From your father?”
“Some. Others from people around him.”
