It was for a wedding.
Mine.
We honeymooned in my mother’s cousin’s village for six days, and he spent four of them on the phone with a contractor about the awning.
The judge looked at me gently.
“Mrs. Costa?”
Vincent tilted his head.
“Go on, Antonia.
Tell them how you became some restaurant queen by mopping floors.”
I could have cried.
I could have screamed.
He wanted that.
He wanted the room to see a broken woman, a discarded wife begging for half of a kingdom he claimed was his.
Instead, I stood.
My attorney, Cordelia Frye, barely moved, but I felt her attention sharpen.
I unbuttoned my gray jacket.
Vincent’s smirk twitched.
Underneath, I wore a sleeveless cream blouse.
Slowly, I turned my left arm toward the courtroom.
The old b*rn sc*r ran from my shoulder to my elbow, shiny and pale, curved like spilled wax.
Then I lifted the edge of the blouse at my ribs, just enough to reveal the long surgical sc*r from the night the industrial mixer cr*shed me because Vincent had removed the safety guard to “speed up production.”
