Chapter 6: Visiting Hours

Dario did not answer his brother's message.

He turned the phone face down on the counter, banked the fire and went upstairs to sleep on the floor outside my door.

He had said he would not touch me.

He had not said he would stop watching the stairs.

At two in the morning I put on his grey coat and took the skiff from the slip.

The cove was flat and cold, and the oars barely made a sound.

I broke his first rule before I had gone fifty yards.

I did not care.

I wanted to see what the Family's grief looked like when nobody was watching it.

I tied the skiff to a dead tree below the cemetery wall and climbed the hill in the dark.

My grave was easy to find.

The earth was still raw, and the stone was a temporary wooden marker with a card pinned to it.

It read: Maeve MacNamara, beloved ward.

It did not say daughter, and it did not say wife.

Someone was kneeling in front of it.

I stopped behind a stone angel twenty feet away, and my heart began to hammer.

It was Stefano.

He was alone.

His overcoat was gone and he wore only a black shirt, wet through at the knees.

A bottle stood in the grass beside him, unopened.

He was speaking low, and the wind carried it to me in pieces.

"I counted the weeks," he said. "It's a stupid thing to count."

"I thought I was a clever man. I thought I had solved your biggest problem."

He laughed, and it broke in the middle.

"You never asked me for a thing. Not once in two years. Do you know I used to wait for it?"

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Test Was Fake, But My Death Was Real from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.