Page 24 of Bad Husband

She looked at him and opened her mouth, only to close it again and to keep walking.

“Does that mean you believe me?” he asked.

“It means we still need to walk the dogs, but I think this is pointless.”

“Why? I made a giant mistake. I am not disputing that. I fucked up. I hurt you. I know nothing I say is going to change that, but I’m right here, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to win you back.”

“What about leave the Bove Mafia?” she asked. “Start a new life? Don’t you get it? I want out. I want to live so I’m not terrified for my life.”

“You were never terrified before,” he said.

“I didn’t know what it was like to live without it. Now I do, and trust me, I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to live in fear. I’m happy here. This is not a life you will ever be happy with,” she said. “This is what I want, but I don’t think it is what you want, and you know what, that is okay. Our marriage was never a love—”

“I love you, Chiara. Love match or not, I fell in love with you, and I know you had feelings for me as well.” He knew how she felt about him, and he wasn’t going to listen to her lie. No fucking way.

“You’re right, I did love you, and I know a part of me still does love you. That is never going to go away, but what does change is how we feel about our circumstances. I never want to live in fear that you’re going to turn on me again.”

“It won’t ever happen.”

“It shouldn’t have happened the first time, Marco, yet it did. Bove Mafia will always come first. I don’t want it to come first, not with me.” One of the dogs whimpered, and she pulled away.

He wanted to argue with her, but that was where he fucked up. He should never have believed what he saw, and should have known there was someone willing to take away all the love they had, to come between them, but he was the one to blame for all of this.

He didn’t know if it was even possible to give up the Bove Mafia. Maybe that was the point, those that left were able to make a clean break, and all ties to the Bove Mafia ceased to exist. Could he do it? Give up all he’d known?

****

“You know that boy is completely smitten with you,” Rosemary said, as Chiara made her way into the kitchen with more empty plates. Some of the customers liked to place them on the stand they had at the corner near the main desk. Others didn’t. Chiara didn’t mind cleaning up. In the last few months, she came to realize cleaning up allowed her to think.

“What?” Chiara asked.

“Marco is always watching you,” Rosemary said, glancing through the window that connected the kitchen to the main diner. “I’ve not seen a man like that since my Richard.” She placed a hand on her heart.

Richard had died at the young age of fifty-five from a heart attack. He’d been in the peak of his health, but he was not aware of his congenital heart defect, which had taken his life. She learned all of this from Heather not long after she moved here.

“I miss my Richard,” Rosemary said.

Rosemary rarely talked about her husband. Chiara looked at the older woman. “Have you ever considered dating again? Finding someone else?”

Rosemary waved her hand and shook her head. “Absolutely not. I would never do that to another soul.”

“What do you mean?”

“My heart belongs to Richard and Richard alone. There is no way I would fall in love with anyone else the way I did with my husband.” She sighed. “I know the movies like to tell us there is more than one person for us, and I get that to some, they love again, but what I had, I’m never going to find again.”

“That must be nice.”

“It’s why I know that Marco is smitten with you.”

“Why?” Chiara asked.

“The way he looks at you. That’s exactly the way my Richard would look at me. Even if we were in a room full of people, he would know how to find me. That was how it always was.” Rosemary sighed. “There could have been dozens of beautiful women in the room, all of them vying for his attention, but it was always me he looked for. That kind of love and devotion is hard to come by these days.”

Chiara couldn’t help but look into the main diner, and Marco was staring right at her, and in that moment, she felt her heart skip a beat. From the moment they met, she’d always found him attractive. She’d been a little afraid, but that was to be expected, because she’d never been married before. Unlike most daughters within the Bove Mafia, she was able to wait until she was twenty-four years old before marrying. Most were married by the time they were eighteen or twenty. She’d been to a lot of weddings in her time.

“I better get back,” Chiara said.

She was not about to tell Rosemary that she and Marco were in fact married, and his lack of trust in her was what ruined their marriage.