After leaving the home 1 had once shared with Dante, I went back to the cramped apartment we'd lived in as newlyweds, ten years ago.

Back then, we had been broke beyond description.

The onlv thing we could afford was a falling-apart rental in the worst neighborhood in the city.

The place itself had been miserable.

But we had been happy in it

In the days when instant noodles were all we could afford, Dante would invent a business meeting where he'd already eaten and tip both packets into my bowl.

And late at night. I'd always catch him at the kitchen sink, drinking glass after glass of tap water to drown out his hunger.

We'd even held our wedding inside that little apartment.

It hadn't been a real wedding either. Just a plain silver band that hadn't cost more than a few hundred dollars.

That place was everything to me.

So even after we moved into the estate that sold for over ten thousand a square foot, I quietly bought the old apartment.

I used to picture Dante and me growing old, then moving back there to live out our last years together.

I'd never imagined the marriage would shatter.

And that I would be the one going back, alone, to the place where it all began.

I twisted the key in the lock and pushed the door open.

The first thing I saw was two bodies tangled together on the couch.

And the matching pajamas Dante and I had once worn- the set I had folded carefully and tucked into the closet-were on Dante and Lorelei now.

My mind went white.

The words ripped out of me before I could stop them. "Dante Salvatore, how could you bring her here? You knew this was our-"

Before I could finish Lorelei lifted her hand and slapped herself across the face.

Then she stood in front of Dante with watery eyes and a swollen cheek and glared at me.

"Donna, I just wanted to see how Don used to live, so I begged him to bring me here. If you're upset, I'll kneel and apologize. Just please don't keep hurting him."

Dante looked stricken on her behalf.

He cradled her face and blew softly across the red mark as if his breath could take the sting away.

Then he flicked one cold glance at the bodyguards behind me.

They pinned my arms instantly, and a wide palm cracked across my face over and over.

My ears rang.

I had no idea how much time passed before they finally let me go.

I crumpled to the floor.

Dante looked down at me with a placid, hollow expression. "Carmela, why do you keep insisting on torturing yourself?"

"lf you don't feel well, go home and recover. Why follow us all the way out here just to start a scene?"

I laughed bitterly. "Home? Do I even have a home? Is that place still mine?" 

I looked up at him through swollen, wet eyes.

Tears mixed with the blood from my nose and dripped onto the floorboards.

"Why did you bring her here, Dante? Sleep with whoever you want. I don`t care anymore. But why did you have to drag her into this place and contaminate it too?"

"Thirty-year-old Dante Salvatore was already rotten through. Why did you have to wreck the only memory twenty-year-old Dante left me?"

Something in his eyes wavered for a fraction of a second before fury took its place. "Rotten through? In what way am I rotten through?"

"Carmela Russo, don't forget that without me, you would have spent your entire life stuck in a dump like this."'

"And don't forget the money you used to buy this place came out of my account. That makes it mine, too."'

His anger curdled into a laugh. "You think bringing Lorelei here defiled this place?"

"Forget defiled. I could blow this dump to pieces, and it still wouldn't have anything to do with you."

He had his men drag me back outside

Then they wired sticks of explosives to the old building.

At his signal, the little place that held the only truly happy memories of our shared past collapsed into rubble.

As flames climbed into the night sky, tears poured down my face.

Dante watched the tears track down my cheeks.

A great deal of the rage drained out of his face, but his voice stayed glacial.

"Carmela Russo, what do I have to say to make you finally understand?"

"I gave you the title of Donna of the Salvatore family. I moved you into the best estate I could find. I draped you in handbags worth a fortune. Even the clothes on your back right now are custom pieces ordinary people couldn't afford in a lifetime."

"Was even that not enough? You're thirty. You're not a young woman anymore. Did you really believe I was still going to love you the way I used to?"

"I gave you the standing that comes with being my donna. I gave you a life of ease. All you ever had to do was look the other way and make space for Lorelei and her child. Was that really too much to ask?"

I held his gaze and answered him one syllable at a time. "I won't. Dante, everything we ever had, you destroyed with your own hands. Let's divorce.