"The rules for a Mafia wife were endless and strict. Once she entered into this life she would never be free. Women in the Mafia were first daughters, then wives, and then mothers; always under the control of a man, always expected to live up to the...
After the kitchen fiasco with the D'Onofrio mother, Liliana quickly grabbed anything she could find from the fridge, and returned to the solace of her new bedroom. Marcello's bedroom. She had been mildly surprised to see boxes in there with her name on - that she hadn't noticed before amidst her frustrations with Marcello. Her belongings from Italy.
Liliana's gut twisted at the knowledge that someone had packed these. Her aunt, or even her cousins perhaps. Had they cared that she was no trapped here in a foreign home with a husband she did not know or want? They had all left her so quickly in Belize without even the faintest goodbye.
Even now her mobile was silent of any notification, and there had been no missed calls. Was she just to be forgotten by them so soon now that she was no longer a Fiorenza by name?
It took Liliana longer than it should have to unpack her things. Most of the boxes were her clothes - and Liliana knew then that her aunt had been the one to organise her things. Her favourite dresses, the pyjamas she wore most, a t-shirt she'd had for years and refused to throw away. It was barely even a fraction of her wardrobe from her aunts home, but these were all things she wore the most, the things she felt most comfortable in. These were all details she knew her cousins would not have thought off when deciding what to send over.
A final box remained, this one filled with her favourite books - even one or two she knew belonged to her aunt but had read countless times over - jewellery, her perfumes, and a couple of photographs Liliana usually kept in her bedside drawer.
One photo in particular was more creased than the rest, from years of using it as a bookmark, or taking it out of the bedside drawer to look at. It was a photo of her parents - taken just before she was born, she was told.
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There hadn't been a lot of photographs of her mama when she was younger. She had understood that her mama's death was still painful for her father - he rarely wished to talk about her at all in fact. Liliana had seem him flinch at the sound of her name - Emiliana - more than enough throughout her childhood to know that the pain was still raw. As such she treasured what little photographs she did have of her mother, and craved any information she could gather about a woman she had never known.
Staring at the photograph in her hands now, feeling all too alone in the heart of a lions dens of mafiosi, she found comfort in her mothers image. Emiliana Fiorenza survived a year married to a mafiosa before she died in childbirth.
If her mama could do it, then she could too, Liliana thought resolutely.
***
When Marcello finally returned to their bedroom, Liliana was already in bed. She sat up against the headboard, watching him with sharp eyes as he lumbered into the room with heavy movements and a clenched jaw. He didn't pay notice to her in his bed, as if she wasn't there at all, and began to strip from his suit with more ferocity than was necessary. It was only when he caught sight of the crumpled photograph she had leant against a pile of books on the dresser - which she had folded in half to hide her father - that he paused.
