After all of this, I was sure it would be over. I thought I could leave the lies, the betrayal, the aches and burns, the stinging, throbbing screams in my heart — all of it — somewhere in the streets of Italy. Who knew that standing in that train station would be the beginning of another chapter of family lies. Another chapter about deception, of keeping a premeditated kidnapping under wraps, all for the sake of protecting our bloodline.

I had two beautiful sons and an abusive husband waiting for my return. I was a broken woman who did as she was told, with no voice in the household when it came to our children. For fucks sake, I wasn't even allowed to learn to drive until after my first son was born. I cooked dinner, ran their baths, cleaned up after my boys — the faily routine a wife was supposed to follow. My life in New York was mundane and basic. But it was everything I knew. It was everything I had. Those boys were my life.

Then I got pregnant again. This new baby would join our family and bring me more joy than I could ever want.

But one morning, my beloved husband received a letter. I was never allowed to read it. From then on, I was not pregnant anymore — not officially. I was ordered to conceal it, forbidden from visiting anyone. No one was to know I was growing. No one was to share in that happiness. Not even me.

My home became a house. My resentment turned me from wife into prisoner. My dignity, my charm, my youth — stripped away the day they took me. I remember looking at my sons with despairing eyes and hopeful words: Mommy will be home soon. I’m not feeling good, I have to go away for a little while…

By then I knew what was happening. I had no choice in any of it. I remember fabricating stories in my mind, justifying the obscenity of it . I pretended I didn’t hate my husband. I learned to bury the disgust I felt for him, just enough to tolerate kissing him. Some days I felt nauseous, swallowing my rage, holding back tears, biting down on the bitterness on my tongue, controlling the urder to break every bone in his chest. Because that was exactly how I felt. I lived inside a spiral of vengeance I could never let loose. So I sat on the couch, put on a smile, and watched my world decay in front of me.

I imagined a grand escape, disappearing with all my children, leaving my husband behind. I dreamed of poisoning him. I pictured sinister ways to hurt myself just enough to blame him, to put him away for years. Some nights I wished he’d simply cheated on me, left us, started a new family somewhere else. But that was never the plan. He wanted this family to grow. They wanted the bloodline to flourish, whatever the cost to me — his wife. I wanted so badly to matter to him. I begged him not to send me away. But they needed the guarantee that I wouldn’t disrupt the process.

For months I lived in Italy with my captors. They didn’t hurt me. I was fed well and I showered in peace. I woke up when I wanted and they let me sit in the garden through the long afternoons. But when the ninth month rolled around, they weren’t so kind anymore. We all knew it was only a matter of time before they were done with me — before the parading around, as if I were some kind of prize would stop. Lucia’s envy of my fertility, her jealousy, would soon come to an end. Now she, too, would know what it meant to become a mother.

The commotion blurred together with the drugs. I remember tiny cries in between bouts of dozing off. I remember blood-stained sheets, sweat on my lip, my hair pulled back by a stranger. I remember reaching for my baby as it was passed into hands that weren’t mine. Was I hallucinating? The next morning I woke to my luggage packed at the foot of my bed. They didn’t even let me heal. I was sent off to the train station.

He handed me my ticket out of their little town in Naples, told me to get to the airport, board my flight, and go home to New York immediately. Corrupt and barbaric as my father-in-law was, he still had a shed of decency left in him — enough to hand me a photograph of my newborn son. And that is where the decency ended, and his cruelty began. There was one condition; tell anyone and you will be sent away to be made to forget your son ever existed.

I felt my insides turning. I wanted to vomit. I was alone, and beaten, and he felt nothing for me. Even if he wanted too, he wouldn’t have dared show it. He let this happen to me, the same as his daughter, Lucia, did, the same as my own husband did. I held that photograph, glaring into his empty eyes; what kind of compensation really was this? He felt nothing. Why would he? His daughter had just received a new baby. My baby. They were on top of the world, and I was dying at the bottom.