Chapter 5
He glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
"Mrs. Moretti?"
"Oak Park."
I gave him an address.
It belonged to a small house my mother had left me.
I had rented it out for years.
The last tenants had moved three months earlier, and I had been debating whether to sell it.
Vincent disliked the place.
Too small.
Too ordinary.
Too far from the world he preferred.
But when the car stopped in front of the narrow brick house with its little porch and bare maple tree, I felt something I had not felt at the mansion in years.
Relief.
The house needed cleaning.
The upstairs bedroom needed furniture.
There was no nursery.
The kitchen was outdated.
The hardwood floors creaked.
I loved it immediately.
Margaret stood beside me on the porch.
"Emily."
I looked at her.
"I'm leaving him."
She didn't say I was emotional from giving birth.
She didn't tell me to reconsider.
She simply asked, "What do you need?"
That nearly broke me.
I looked through the front window at the empty living room.
Then down at Lily.
"A moving company."
That afternoon, I turned my phone back on.
There were forty-three missed calls.
Twenty-one from Vincent.
Several from Anthony.
Four from Vincent's mother.
Two from numbers I didn't recognize.
And one message from my husband.
**My flight is delayed. I'll be home as soon as I can. Please answer me.**
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I opened my calendar.
Vincent had left thirteen days ago.
And despite everything he controlled, despite all the people who moved when he said move and stopped when he said stop, there was one thing Vincent Moretti had never imagined he could lose.
Me.
The next morning, I called a moving company.
And for the first time in my marriage, I made a major decision without asking my husband what he thought.
My husband was in Paris with the woman he had never stopped loving when I went into labor with our daughter.Chapter 1: PART 1: THE NIGHT HE WASN'T THERE
PART 2: EVERYTHING HIS MONEY COULDN'T KEEP
"How much are you moving, ma'am?"
The woman from the moving company sounded distracted until I answered.
"Just my things and my daughter's."
There was a pause.
"Furniture too?"
"Her crib. The rocking chair. The changing table."
I looked around the nursery.
Everything inside it had been chosen with ridiculous care.