The same forty years that he thought would blind me to his crime were the forty years that made his victim someone I loved, and a man will do things to protect someone he loves that he would never do for a stranger, including the unbearable thing, the thing Luca never imagined I was capable of: turning against the friend to save the friend’s wife.

He had weighed my loyalty and concluded it would protect him.

He had not understood that my loyalty was never, fundamentally, to him.

It was to the people I love — all of them, Jessi as much as him — and the moment he made himself the threat to one of them, the loyalty he counted on became the force that ended him.

He thought he had two friends who would protect him.