The dog bowl was still warm from the kitchen when I set it down in front of her. Leftover eggs. Torn pieces of toast. Something that had once been bacon, floating in cold grease.

"Enjoy your last meal," I said.

Behind me, my three-year-old daughter cried into the maid's apron—quietly, the way a child cries once she has learned that crying costs her something. Bianca's face went white. My man Marcus stopped moving under the broken antique map rack, and I understood then that the two of them were afraid of the same thing.

Not me. What I had found.

I hadn't told her yet. I had only read the maid's face—and the maid's face had already told me the number.

Eleven. One for every morning I had been too busy to ask.

The coffee was still hot. That was the part I came back to later, in the weeks after—the small, obscene ordinariness of it. Steam curling off three cups. The smell of eggs. The silver spoon Bianca kept for her sugar, lying at the exact angle she preferred. Everything in that room behaving as though it were a Tuesday.

Then I set the dog bowl down in front of her.

"Enjoy your last meal."

Bianca's face went white. Marcus stopped moving beneath the broken antique map rack. Lucy was behind me with Emma, crying softly against the maid's apron. The sound was quiet enough that another man might have missed it. Quiet was how my daughter cried now. Three weeks at the main estate had taught her that.

I did not miss it.

Bianca stared at the bowl. Her hands came down flat on the table, the way a person braces for a table to move.

"You wouldn't," she whispered.

I looked at her. She had misunderstood me. That frightened her more, once she understood she had. She searched my face for the version of me she had spent a year learning—the man who let her speak over dinner, who signed what she put in front of him, who came home too tired to ask what had happened during the day.

He wasn't there.

"I'm not asking you to eat it," I said.

Her breathing slowed. Relief moved through her shoulders, slow and stupid.

"I'm telling you this is the last meal you will ever control in my house."

The relief died instantly.

I reached under my collar and took the chain. My fingers knew it without looking. I wore it when I worked, under the shirt, so it never caught on anything. The engagement ring had hung there for eleven months, and I had never once been able to explain why I kept it off my hand and next to my chest.

I laid it on the breakfast table, between her cup and her spoon. Her own ring suddenly looked very large on her finger. That was the trick with diamonds. They only looked like something when someone else wanted them.

"Vittorio—"

"No."