His Sleeping Wife

The wedding settled a debt. The marriage was supposed to be a formality. Nunzia is twenty-one and asleep in the car before it reaches her new husband's courtyard. Tommaso Greco is forty-three and does not wake her — not that night, not for many nights after. What he does instead, in the dark, she only half-remembers. What she does when she finds out she is pregnant, she will never forget. She leaves for Bari with nothing but her dowry and a name. She returns a year later with a daughter, two of his men in her pocket, and a proposal of her own. A real marriage, negotiated at his kitchen table. Or a public accounting. He has until dawn to choose.