THE RAIN ON CASTELLANO STREET Chapter 7

Dom called seventeen times in three days.

I blocked every number. He sent flowers — white lilies, my favorite, a dozen arrangements that filled the hallway outside my parents' house like a funeral. My father threw them all in the trash.

On the fourth day, I was discharged. I went back to my parents' house and slept for sixteen hours straight.

On the sixth day, I went outside to take out the garbage and ran into Dom on the sidewalk.

He looked terrible.

I had never seen him look anything less than immaculate — not in four years of marriage, not once. He always shaved. Always wore clothes that fit perfectly. Always carried himself like a man who had every inch of the world under control.

Now he stood on my parents' sidewalk in wrinkled clothes, with dark circles under his eyes and three days of stubble on his jaw, and he looked like someone had hollowed him out from the inside.

"Mara." He stepped forward. "How are you feeling? Is the pain—"

"Better," I said. Flat. Giving him nothing.

He nodded. Swallowed. Reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black box.

"I had these made," he said. He opened the box. Inside were two rings — simple, elegant, white gold with a single small diamond. They were beautiful.

"Our wedding rings got damaged," he said. "When you fell. I had the jeweler remake them from the original design. Exactly the same."

I looked at the rings. Then at Dom.

When we got married, we had designed our rings together — sitting at a jeweler's counter in the Meatpacking District, laughing over champagne, picking out stones and arguing about band width. It had been one of the happiest afternoons of my life.

Dom had promised me, that day, that he would never take his ring off. "No matter what happens," he said. "This stays on."

I had believed him.

I had believed him right up until the day I noticed the ring was gone from his finger. When I confronted him about it, he said Vanessa got upset seeing it — it reminded her of Marco, of her own lost marriage. So he had quietly slipped it off and put it in a drawer.

I had let it go. Because that was what you did in the Castellano world. You let things go. You didn't make scenes. You didn't ask too many questions. You survived by being quiet and compliant and grateful for whatever scraps of attention you were given.

I was done being grateful.

"I don't want them," I said.

Dom's hand tightened around the box. "Mara—"

"The rings don't fix anything. The rings are just another pretty thing in a box, like everything else in this marriage."

"Then what do you want?" His voice cracked — actually cracked, for the first time in all the years I had known him. "Tell me what I have to do and I'll do it. Anything."

"Sign the divorce papers."

The words landed like a slap. Dom actually flinched.

"I'm not signing those."

"Then we have nothing left to say to each other."

"Mara, please—"

"I mean it, Dom." I looked at him — really looked, the way I hadn't let myself look in months, because looking meant feeling, and feeling meant breaking. "If you don't sign, don't come back here. Don't call. Don't send flowers. Don't show up on my sidewalk with jewelry and sad eyes. It's over. Do you understand?"

Dom stood there, the ring box still open in his hand, and for one terrible moment I thought he was going to cry. Dominic Castellano, crying on a sidewalk in South Boston, in front of a two-bedroom rowhouse, over a woman he was supposed to be done with.

He didn't cry. But something in his face changed — something broke, quietly, behind his eyes — and he closed the box and put it back in his pocket and turned and walked away without another word.

I watched him go and felt nothing.

That was the worst part. Not the anger. Not the hurt. The nothing.

I went inside and threw out the garbage and made myself a cup of tea and sat at my parents' kitchen table and stared at the steam rising from the cup and tried to remember what it felt like to want something.