I walked over to the bookshelf in the living room. Past the baby books, past the cookbooks, to the bottom shelf. I pulled out a dusty hardcover copy of The Art of War. Kevin had bought it to look smart on Zoom calls but had never cracked the spine.
I opened the book. The pages had been hollowed out years ago. Sitting in the cavity was a phone. Not my cracked smartphone with the baby pictures. A burner phone. An old, indestructible Nokia brick.
There was only one number saved in it.
I dialed. It rang once.
“Princess?”
The voice on the other end was like gravel crunching under heavy boots. It was a voice that had ordered hits, negotiated peace treaties between crime families, and silenced witnesses.
“Is everything okay?” the voice continued, sharp with sudden worry. “The signal from your bracelet hasn’t moved, but the pulse monitor spiked.”
“I’m fine, Daddy,” I said. The softness of the ‘boring housewife’ evaporated completely, replaced by the cold, steel tone of a woman born into the Moretti bloodline. “But I’m done playing house. The experiment is over.”
There was a pause on the line. The air pressure in the room seemed to drop. “He left?”
“He left,” I confirmed, walking to the window to watch the dust settle on the driveway. “He said I was boring. He said I lacked ‘class.’ He’s moving into the SkyView Penthouse with a woman named Bella.”
