THE RAIN ON CASTELLANO STREET Chapter 3

I didn't go back to the apartment that night.

I checked into a hotel downtown — a small, anonymous place where no one knew my name or my husband's. I sat on the bed in my clothes and stared at the wall and tried to feel something other than the cold, spreading numbness in my chest.

I had my answer. Dom had given it to me, not with words but with that look — that fraction of a second where he glanced at Vanessa before he responded to me. That tiny, involuntary movement that told me everything I needed to know.

He would choose her. He had already chosen her. He just hadn't said it out loud yet.

I picked up my phone and called my lawyer. Not a family lawyer — my own. The one I had quietly hired six months ago, after I first started to suspect that something was wrong. The one Dom didn't know about.

"I need to move forward," I said. "Draft the paperwork."

A pause on the other end. "Are you sure? Once we file—"

"I'm sure."

I hung up and lay back on the hotel bed. The ceiling was white and featureless and I stared at it until my eyes burned.

Two days later, I went back to the apartment to get my things.

Dom wasn't there. I packed quickly — clothes, documents, the few personal items I had brought into this marriage. A photo of my parents. A ring my grandmother had given me. A sketchbook I had been filling since college.

I left everything else. The furniture, the artwork, the thousand-dollar thread-count sheets — none of it was mine. Dom had chosen all of it. I had just lived inside his choices for four years.

On my way out, I passed through the kitchen and stopped.

There, on the counter, was a new photo on Dom's phone — face up, screen still lit. Vanessa, glowing, holding up two baby booties. Dom's arm around her shoulders. Both of them smiling at the camera like a couple from a lifestyle magazine.

The caption on the photo, visible in the preview: "Baby daddy finally came to visit. He says this is where his heart lives now."

I looked at the photo for a long time.

Then I picked up the phone, opened it — I knew his password, of course, the way wives always know their husbands' passwords — and deleted the photo.

It was a small, petty thing. Meaningless, really. But it was the only power I had left, and I took it.

I locked the apartment behind me and didn't look back.

For three days, Dom didn't call. Didn't text. Didn't show up.

I stayed at my parents' house — a small brick rowhouse on the south side, the same house I had grown up in, the same house Dom had stood outside of for three days without eating when he wanted to marry me. The irony wasn't lost on me.

My mother noticed immediately. She always did.

"You look pale," she said, the first morning. "Are you eating?"

"I'm fine, Mom."

"You're not fine. You haven't been fine for weeks. I can see it."

Mothers always see it. I didn't have the energy to pretend.

I spent those three days alone in my old bedroom, curled up on my childhood bed, and tried to figure out what to do about the baby growing inside me.

It was Dom's. Of course it was Dom's. We had been trying for years — carefully, hopefully, with the kind of quiet desperation that couples share when they want something so badly they're afraid to say it out loud.

And now I was pregnant. And Dom had no idea. And the woman he was supposedly "helping" was pregnant too, with a baby he had helped create, in an apartment he had bought for her, in a life he had built for her piece by piece while I sat in our kitchen wondering why he was never home.

On the fourth day, I made my decision.

I called the clinic and scheduled the procedure. Not because I didn't want the baby. I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.

But I couldn't bring a child into this. Into a marriage that was already dead. Into a family where the patriarch's bloodline was everything, where loyalty meant more than love, and where a woman like me — a nobody with no leverage and no protection — would be discarded the moment she stopped being useful.

The appointment was set for next week.

I lay in bed that night and pressed both hands against my stomach — still flat, still ordinary, giving nothing away — and whispered an apology to someone who couldn't hear me yet.