When the Mafia Broke My Heart

I found out my husband was cheating the way you find a dropped stitch, all at once and too late to unpick it clean. I opened the wrong door at the Blue Draft on a Saturday night in May and there was Vance Ostrby, the man I had given my whole life to, with Orla Prycegate in his lap. I did not scream. I went home, cut the warp off my loom, and left the holler with three weeks of a secret already growing under my ribs.

I weave coverlets the old way, the overshot patterns my grandmother tied on before I was born, and the first thing that trade teaches you is that you live with the draft you tied on. You thread the whole pattern before you throw a single pick, and once it is set you cannot change it without cutting everything off and starting over. I thought I had cut Vance off clean. I was wrong. Five years later the mafia that made him needs me back down the holler, and he walks up my porch steps and does the math on a pair of little red boots by the door, and I watch the man who broke my heart understand that he has a daughter.

Vance wants back in. Not into the bed, not yet, not into the easy forgiveness he has no right to. He wants back into the pattern, and he knows better than to ask for it with words. Told in three voices, mine and his and his brother's, this is the story of a man learning to sit down at a loom he does not know how to work, one honest pick at a time, while an enemy named Ives circles our girl and the whole cost of what he did gets counted out loud, in front of everyone, by me.

He will not earn it cheap. He will give up the rank, the money, the protection, everything the life ever handed him, and he will stand in my shop with empty hands and let me decide whether the old warp gets cut off for good or whether we thread a new one together. Some patterns you have to live with. This is the one we chose to weave.