After that night, I buried myself in work at the family's downtown offices, staying late enough that the cleaning crews learned my name. I rarely returned to the brownstone Xavier and I shared on the east side of the Jade Quarter. The distance unsettled him. I could tell by the clipped voicemails he left, each one a degree cooler than the last.
One afternoon, my phone buzzed with a number I knew too well. Jane Salvatore. My mother-in-law, a woman who had never once looked at me without the faintest curl of disgust on her painted lips, as though I were something unpleasant tracked in on the bottom of a shoe. She had always regarded me as a dirty orphan girl, unworthy of the Salvatore name, unworthy of breathing the same air as her precious son.
"Mia." Her voice came through the receiver like a razor drawn slowly across silk. "Xavier tells me you've been fighting with him. That it was your behavior that embarrassed us at the Valducci banquet. Even though you were born with nothing, no family, no one to teach you how to carry yourself, the least you could do is not drag my son down to your level."
She paused only long enough to inhale.