He Protected My Baby's Killer, So I Left Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Come Now

Livia packs and walks out of the condo while Carina's texts pull Dominic to the door; at her aunt's store the man she threw out of her engagement party is waiting.

Dominic came to collect me from the hospital alone, in a clean coat, with my winter boots in a bag.

He was calm the whole way down in the elevator.

"Put it off," he said. "That's all I'm asking. Until Carina's hearing is behind us and people stop staring."

"People stare because you left a woman in a hospital bed."

"I came back."

"You came back nine hours later, with a text."

He drove us to the condo without answering, and I let him, because my things were there.

The doorman on the ground floor looked at my face and then politely at the wall.

Upstairs, the second bedroom door was shut.

We had bought a white crib in September.

It was still in its box behind that door, and I walked past it with my hand flat against the wall.

I took the big suitcase from the hall closet and opened it on our bed.

Dominic leaned in the doorway. "Livia. Where would you even go?"

"My aunt's."

"Over a hardware store."

"With a lock on the door."

He let that go by.

I folded my work clothes and my mother's rosary, and the grey sweater he said he hated.

He watched me pack for a while, then went into the kitchen to make coffee.

He put a cup on the dresser and stood there with his hands in his pockets.

"I know what you think happened Sunday," he said.

"I know what the camera showed."

"Carina has been in a bad way since her brother. You don't know what that does to a person. Twelve years of it."

"Twelve years," I said. "That's why four grown men couldn't stay with me for one night."

His phone buzzed in the kitchen.

He ignored it, and it buzzed again.

I zipped the suitcase and carried it to the front door, and the phone was lying face up on the island when I passed.

The screen said: C, and a small red heart. Come now. I can't stop shaking.

I stopped and read it twice.

Dominic had followed me out. He saw me looking and said nothing.

"She has panic attacks," he said finally. "It's like this every few weeks."

"Go."

"I'm not leaving you."

"Dominic." I kept my voice level. "She's going to call twice more. You'll say it's only for an hour."

The phone buzzed a third time.

He picked it up and held it against his chest and didn't answer.

He looked at me, and at the phone, and at the door.

I watched him stand there until the phone buzzed a fourth time.

Then he said, "An hour. I'll come to your aunt's after. I'll bring dinner."

I put my key on the island, where his phone had been.

"Don't," I said.

He was already texting someone.

I took the elevator down by myself and rolled the suitcase out past the doorman.

He opened the door for me and said, "I'm sorry, Miss Santangelo," and I thanked him.

I walked to Atwells Avenue.

It was a mile, and I didn't take the bus. I wanted every step to be mine.

The hardware store sat between a bakery and a shuttered pharmacy, with a green awning my father had hung when I was nine.

The bell over the door still stuck on the first ring.

My aunt looked up from the register, took one look at the suitcase, and didn't ask a question.

She came around the counter and held my face in both her hands.

"Upstairs is made up," she said. "I aired it out Sunday night."

"Thank you."

"Eat. Then cry. Or the other way around."

She was sixty-one and had run that store alone since my uncle died, and she was the only person in my life who had never told me to calm down.

I started toward the back stairs.

"Wait," she said. "There's a man here asking for you."

I turned.

He stood at the far end of the plumbing aisle with his back to a rack of copper fittings.

He was tall, in a work jacket with a tow company's name stitched over the pocket, with grey coming in at his temples and grease in the creases of his hands.

One of them had an old burn scar on the back, pale and shiny.

I knew him from somewhere, and I couldn't place it.

Then I did.

Seven months ago, at my engagement party, a man had climbed up on a garden chair and shouted something across the lawn at Dominic.

I never heard what.

Dominic had laughed and said he was an old friend who had stolen from the family.

I had asked the caterer to see him out.

He had gone without a fight, in front of two hundred guests, and he had looked at me the whole way across the grass.

He was looking at me now.

"Livia," he said. "My name is Elio. I'd like five minutes, if you'll give them to me."

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