Chapter Text
The moral of the story is,
that I will gut you if I need to.
I will carve my way out
with only my teeth.
The thing about killing your husband is that nobody tells you how much of the paperwork is the same.
The official story — the one the Madre Linda Police Department had closed their file on, the one that the Chronicle published before the news cycle moved on — was that Joseph Goldberg, beloved husband and father, had perished in a house fire of undetermined origin. Survived by his wife, Love Quinn-Goldberg, and their infant son, Henry Forty Quinn-Goldberg. The funeral services were private. In lieu of flowers, donations to a literacy nonprofit, because even in death, she was managing Joe's optics.
Death certificate. Beneficiary forms. The life insurance policy Joe had taken out eighteen months into their marriage. The policy was real, at least. That much held up. Love signed seventeen documents in the week after the fire. Seventeen. She knows because she counted, standing barefoot in her a motel in San Jose at six in the morning with Henry on her hip and a pen in her free hand, thinking: seventeen.
Thinking: Joe would have made a whole thing about the number seventeen. Some literary significance. Some Nabokov footnote nobody asked for.
Thinking: Joe is now dead.
It still did that sometimes. Arrived mid-thought, flat and declarative, like a correction.
Love would say it to herself the way you press a bruise. Not masochistically, but practically. A reminder. A temperature check. Because the grief, when it came, was so structurally weird that she didn't entirely trust it.
It arrived in the wrong order, at the wrong times, about the wrong things.
She'd cried, genuinely and without performance, over finding his French press in a box of kitchen items she'd saved from the house. A French press. She had not cried at his funeral. She'd stood in the cemetery in a black dress she'd bought at Nordstrom the morning of. Because nothing in her wardrobe felt right.
Which was its own kind of information.
The fire investigator had been thorough. She'd give him that.
He'd walked the wreckage with a clipboard and a carefully modulated expression of professional sympathy and explained — gently, because she was a widow, because she had a baby on her hip and mascara she'd strategically not quite finished crying off — that these things happened. Old wiring. A gas leak. Small failures that accumulate, sometimes, into something irreversible.
Love nodded. She'd pressed her lips together in a way that suggested tremendous, quiet courage.
She was, in fact, being tremendously courageous. Just not in the way he thought.
Here is what she has learned about grief: it is very easy to perform when you are also genuinely grieving.
People expect the widow to cry, and Love had cried — in the car, mostly, with Henry strapped into his seat, the coastal highway unspooling ahead of her, the smoke still faintly in her hair.
She cried because Joe was dead. She cried because she loved him — genuinely, in the volcanic way she loved most things she decided were worth loving. She cried because he looked at her, at the end, like she was a mistake he was still calculating the cost of.
She cried because he was going to leave her.
That's the part that doesn't fold neatly into the widow narrative.
The part she turns over sometimes, late at night when Henry is finally down and the house is quiet enough that the inside of her head gets loud. Joe had been building an exit — some private, meticulous, Joe-shaped door out of their marriage and towards another woman. He was a man incapable of staying. Incapable of recognizing something worth staying for.
Love had gotten there first. That's all.
She'd just gotten there first.
So yes. She's grieving.
It's just that the grief has other things in it — rage, and relief, and something with no clean name that tastes like swallowing glass and being surprised when it doesn't hurt more.
She's sad he's dead. She's sad, sometimes, that she's the one who made him that way. She's sad that Henry will grow up with a photograph instead of a father, and no explanation into his tiny cruelties. She loved Joe. She is furious at herself for having loved him. She is more furious at him for having been worth it, briefly, before he wasn't.
"Grief", her therapist says, the new one, the one she's been lying to more efficiently, "doesn't have to be linear".
No. It doesn't. It isn't.
Before he died, Joe had used the word 'problem'.
He said, while paralyzed on the cashmere-carpeted floor of their expensive Madre Linda home: 'you have a problem, Love.'
Very calm. Very measured. The most honest Joe had ever been with her, and he'd chosen to be honest while he was still metabolizing the aconite she'd put on the knife handle and he was meant to be dying, which had made it a fairly ironic move. The kind of thing Joe excelled at, even at the end. Especially at the end.
Love thought about that sentence every day for six months.
She'd thought about it and she'd looked at Henry — Henry, who had Joe's chin and her stubbornness and a smile so uncomplicated it sometimes made her chest ache with something she didn't have a word for — and Love thought: I have a son. I am not going to have a problem. The problem ended in Madre Linda. The problem is in the ground.
Henry didn't ask about his father yet.
He was too young for questions, still operating at the level of incoherent babbles which meant hungry and tired and where is the blue truck.
But that window was closing soon. She knew that.
She had prepared for that.
She had a whole story assembled — Daddy was very sick, daddy loved you so much, sometimes things happen that we don't understand — delivered, in her rehearsals, with the exactly correct amount of quiet sadness. She'd practiced it in the mirror. She'd gotten quite good.
Joe would have found that funny. Probably.
She tried not to think about whether Joe would have found things funny. That line of thinking had a way of going somewhere unproductive.
The decision to come back to Los Angeles had been, on paper, obvious. And Los Angeles received its prodigal daughters without ceremony or apology, which Love had always appreciated about it.
For starters: Love had grown up here.
She had her father, strained as that was; Ray Quinn, who had never quite known what to do with her, who had married Dottie's chaos and then spent thirty years blaming the chaos for his own failures, who had looked at Love across his kitchen island the morning after she arrived with an expression she'd identified, after a moment, as guilt. Ray was not a man who did guilt gracefully. He did it the way he did most uncomfortable emotions: expensively. The guest suite had been freshly renovated.
No one had looked twice at her. No one in the gas stations on the drive from Madre Linda had asked questions. The city had simply absorbed her back into itself — widow, infant, Toyota Prius, the faint smell of someone else's tragedy still clinging to the lining of their boxed things— with the magnificent indifference that was, she had come to understand, Los Angeles's primary love language.
She had missed it, which surprised her.
She never thought she would miss it.
Madre Linda had done something strange to her sense of scale — shrunk the perimeter of what felt possible, until she'd been living inside something the size of a snow globe: pretty, self-contained, and suffocating. Coming back to the city felt like a window opening. She'd driven the 10 with Henry in the backseat and the January sun doing that specific gold thing it does in winter and thought: oh. Right. This.
Then she'd thought: Joe never liked LA. He tolerated it. He looked at the skyline with that particular expression — the one she'd mistaken, early on, for depth — like the city owed him an apology.
Then she'd thought: stop it.
Love realized quickly, that returning to Los Angeles was less of a reunion, and more of a spin-off.
For starters, her mother was currently in Ojai, which meant her mother was not in Ojai in any of the ways that screamed wellness retreat and Instagrammable sunsets.
She was in Ojai… in a clinical sense. Rehab.
Admitted to The Meadows with a Louis Vuitton bag and a blood alcohol level her doctors described as concerning, it had taken Love longer than she'd like to admit to understand that this time was different.
Treatment was supposed to be sixty days. Then ninety. Then: open-ended and progress-dependent, which was the clinical way of saying nobody knew yet.
Turns out, the divorce from Ray had done something to her mother that Love was still finding language for.
Which was saying something, because Love had watched her mother survive quite a lot. Forty's addiction. Forty's death. The particular long-term violence of being married to Raymond Quinn, which operated like a disease — slow, cumulative, the ground shifting by increments so small you didn't notice until the foundations were already cracked.
Ray had that talent. For breaking things so gradually that the thing itself couldn't tell you when it had started.
Dottie called on the good days. Asked about Henry's weight, his words, whether Love had found a pediatrician she trusted. On the harder days she called Henry Forty and then went quiet in the way that meant someone was coming to take the phone, and Love would sit with the silence for a moment before hanging up and going to find something to clean.
Love hadn't told her about Anavrin yet.
Anavrin was the crumbling Babylon in the center of all this.
Anavrin, which her mother had built from nothing — or not nothing, from Ray's money and Dottie's vision and an almost embarrassing amount of conviction that Los Angeles needed another luxury organic grocery store. Anavrin, which Ray had taken in the divorce because he'd taken everything in the divorce, systematically, with the focused energy of a man whose attorneys billed at a thousand dollars an hour and who had nothing else going on. Anavrin, which was bleeding money now — Love looked at the ledgers, couldn't help herself, couldn't walk into a failing kitchen without wanting to fix the stove — because Ray didn't understand what Dottie had understood, which was that the store had never really been about the food.
It had been about the feeling. The specific, carefully engineered feeling that you were the kind of person who shopped at Anavrin.
Her mother had understood that. Her mother… was also currently in a treatment facility in Ojai, learning, reportedly, to understand other things.
I could build it back, Love had thought, standing in the cold-lit produce section at seven in the morning while Henry sat in the cart eating a rice cake. I could build it back and it would be something to do that wasn't grieving or mothering or playing the sorry widow whose husband perished in a housefire.
Ray had given her the store the way you give a dog a bone: with one hand extended and the other one held behind his back. You should take the store, he’d said, It would give you something to focus on. Something that's yours.
Something that's yours.
As though it weren't Dottie's concept, Dottie's vision, Dottie's name in reverse above the door. As though the asset hadn't been stripped from her mother's name in the divorce settlement while Dottie was still in the stage of grief that looked, from the outside, indistinguishable from a very expensive spiral.
As though Love were being offered a gift rather than a problem on the verge of bankruptcy.
She had taken the bone anyway.
Because she recognized a leash when she saw one and she was too tired to find her own and the length of this one, at least, gave her room to move.
Love looked at the financial statements the following Tuesday, Henry asleep in the carrier against her chest, and felt something cold and clarifying move through her.
The store was hemorrhaging. Bleeding money.
Quietly, consistently, the way something does when it’s been unattended just long enough for the damage to start looking natural. Shrinkage in all the wrong categories. Suppliers her mother would never have used. The lighting in the prepared foods section had been swapped for something fluorescent and cheerless that made the food look like evidence. Someone — she suspected Ray’s property manager, whose aesthetic sensibility suggested he thought Cheesecake Factory was aspirational — had removed the handwritten chalkboard menus her mother refreshed every week and replaced them with laminated cards.
Laminated, she thought. In Anavrin.
Joe, for all his faults had always understood why that would have mattered to her.
He'd had that quality: the ability to see what something meant, underneath what it was. She'd loved that about him before she'd understood that he used it like a tool, that the seeing was never innocent, that Joe Goldberg looked at the things people loved so he'd know exactly where to put the knife.
Difference is that this time, Love put it in first.
Luckily, according to her father, there was hope.
There were investors, Ray mentioned almost offhand.
Not the photographable kind, not the press-release kind. He'd said the name Gelati and then lifted his wine glass and looked elsewhere, in the manner of a man who has just handed someone a lit match and would prefer not to watch what happens next.
Gelati… where had Love heard that surname before?
She'd googled them that night, after Henry was down, sitting cross-legged on the guest suite bed with her laptop and a glass of wine she probably didn't need.
It hadn't taken long.
The Gelati family occupied a specific stratum of Los Angeles mythology — the kind that showed up in longform journalism and then promptly disappeared before anything went to trial.
Mafia. Organized Crime. Embezzlement. Extortion. At some point, Love wasn’t sure if she was reading a news article or a synopsis to the Godfather.
Victor Gelati and Rocco Gelati, it's two big men - Dons. Gelati Construction, which had its hands in half the development projects in the city and whose financing, several articles had carefully implied without quite stating, did not always originate from sources that welcomed scrutiny.
She'd closed the laptop. She'd finished the wine.
The thing was — and she was aware of how this sounded, she was aware — the Quinns had never been entirely precious about where money came from either.
Her father's family had built its first real estate portfolio in the seventies through a series of partnerships that, examined closely, did not entirely bear examination. Her mother had always understood that Los Angeles ran on a certain pragmatic flexibility about the distinction between legitimate and merely legal.
Besides, Love needed the capital. And the Gelatis needed to clean their dirty capital.
It was, at its core, a transaction between two parties who both had reasons to keep things uncomplicated, and Love Quinn had not survived the last two years by being sentimental about the provenance of useful things.
Practically a family tradition, she thought, and felt something that wasn't quite amusement and wasn't quite shame settle somewhere in her chest, and left it there.
You have a problem, Joe said, in the back of her head, in that reasonable and level tone he'd used at the end.
I have a grocery store, she thought back. Which is more than you have, dead man.
The reopening had, by any objective measure, come together beautifully.
She would not pretend otherwise. She had worked too hard on it to be falsely modest, and false modesty had always seemed to her one of the more exhausting social performances.
Anavrin gleamed.
The lighting was her mother's, reinstated after three weeks of quiet, focused effort that had felt more like archaeology than renovation — uncovering the original intention beneath Ray's neglect, layer by layer, until the room looked like itself again. The prepared foods were extraordinary; she'd spent a week on the menu alone. The string quartet near the back were doing something understated and correct. The flowers were from her mother's woman in Silver Lake, the same ones Dottie had used for a decade.
The guest list was thick with wellness influencers, local press, the particular species of Los Angeles person who considered a grocery store re-opening a cultural event worth attending — and who were, notably, correct to do so, because Love had made it one.
She moved through the room the way she'd been doing since she was sixteen: warmly, efficiently, leaving each person feeling briefly and completely attended to. She had always been genuinely good at this, which was the part people never quite believed about her. They assumed the warmth was performance. It wasn't. She was actually interested. She actually listened. She actually retained the names of children, the titles of projects, the minor anxieties people disclosed at parties when they'd had enough to drink and hadn't yet had enough to regret it.
The assessment arrived alongside the interest, automatic and quiet, the way breathing did.
She was midway through a conversation with a food writer from the Times — something about Anavrin's philosophy of nourishment that she was producing without fully engaging her brain — when she felt a hand on her arm.
Calvin.
Love turned, and there he was. Calvin, who had given Joe the job. Who had handed him a position and a reason to be in this building, in her orbit, in her life. Calvin, who she hadn't seen in almost 2 years.
"He used to talk about this place like it was the best thing about LA," Calvin said. His expression doing the careful thing people's expressions did when they were about to say a dead man's name out loud. "I'm glad it's back. He would have—"
"He really would have," she said, and smiled in the way that closed a sentence gently, and moved on.
Calvin squeezed her arm. "He would have been so proud."
Would he, Love thought.
"Thank you," Love said.
This was the thing people kept doing. Mentioning Joe.
Carefully, with that particular mixture of sympathy and curiosity that widowhood attracted — the way a bruise attracted fingers.
She had perfected the ‘widow expression’: present, pained, private. She'd practiced it early on and had felt briefly unhinged for doing so, and had done it anyway, because preparation was not the same as insincerity.
Love… missed him.
Parts of him.
Specific parts, which she'd catalogued with the same precision she'd applied to the Anavrin inventory: the way he talked about books, the quality of his attention when it was fully on her, the particular and infuriating accuracy with which he'd been able to identify what a thing meant to someone beneath what it simply was. She had loved that about him before she'd understood that he used it like a scalpel.
Before she'd understood that Joe Goldberg looked at the things people loved so he'd know exactly where they were soft.
Love missed those parts. She was furious at herself for missing them. She was more furious at him, still, for having made them worth missing.
The grief was not clean. It had never been clean.
She had stopped waiting for it to become clean and had simply decided to carry it and keep moving, because Henry needed her to keep moving, and because Love was her mother's daughter, and Dottie Quinn had not raised anyone who stopped.
Her father arrived at eight-fifteen, which was late enough to be noticed and early enough to be forgiven, which was very Ray.
He brought two men with him.
Love recognized them from the photographs she'd looked at on her laptop three weeks ago: Victor Gelati, older than the images, heavier, with the absolute and practiced stillness of a man who had long ago stopped needing to demonstrate that he was the most dangerous person in a room. And beside him Rocco, sharper-faced, whose eyes did a slow professional sweep of the space — exits, guests, points of interest.
Colleagues, her father said, in the tone that meant don't push it.
Love shook both their hands.
Victor held hers a beat longer than necessary. "Your father speaks very highly of you," he said. An assessment wearing a compliment's clothes.
"He's very kind," she said.
They understood each other. The way people who operated in the margins of things always understood each other — not warmly, but accurately. She wondered, briefly, whether they knew what she was. Whether the lawyers had disclosed, in the course of due diligence, certain aspects of the Madre Linda timeline. Whether it mattered either way.
Mob men, she thought, watching them settle into the far corner with their whiskeys and her father and their low, continuous murmur of conversation.
Criminal men. Bad men.
Love thought about how different that made them from herself, and found she didn't have a clean answer, and moved on.
She said something gracious to the Times writer. She checked her phone — the babysitter had texted a photo of Henry asleep, one fist curled against his cheek, looking so uncomplicated and so entirely like himself.
Henry was fine. The evening was going well. She was completely, professionally fine.
And then a glass shattered.
The glass did not fall dramatically.
That was the thing. It was a small sound, actually, a bright sharp pop that paused the room for exactly one second before everyone collectively decided it wasn't their problem and resumed. Heads turned on instinct, scanning for the source before the brain has decided whether to be interested.
Love's turned with them.
And that is where she saw Him.
The man was already still.
Standing in the particular arrested posture of someone who has just had something embarrassing happen in public. His navy trousers, now liberally decorated from knee to shin with what appeared to be fruit punch. A broken glass beside his foot.
And before him, a small girl — seven, eight — with the face of someone who had been running between legs at a party and had arrived at a consequence she was still hoping to negotiate.
The mother was at the bar. Had been at the bar, Love suspected, for most of the last hour.
Love watched. Waited for the sigh, the dismissal, the practiced adult blankness that communicated: this is an inconvenience and I am choosing not to engage with it.
The girl had clearly been running. There was a small pack of children who'd been doing a mostly harmless circuit of the room for the last hour, and Love had been monitoring them with the background awareness of someone whose own child was temporarily elsewhere, and apparently one of them had not quite navigated the turn near the beverage display.
He laughed.
Short, genuine, and directed mostly at himself, at the spreading stain on his trousers, at the general situation. Then he reached for a napkin from the nearest table and began dabbing at the mess with the resigned practicality of someone who had made peace with a lifetime of small disasters and was not going to start taking them personally now.
And then he crouched.
All the way down. Eye level. Not looming over the child as an adult with an inconvenience but meeting her as a person.
Love was close enough to almost lip-read: it's fine, honey. Are you alright?
The girl's shoulders dropped half an inch. The physical release of a child who has realized the consequence isn't coming.
"Gio, honey, did she get that all over you? Susan, how many times do I need to tell you to watch where you're going!"
The mother, arriving from the bar with a passionfruit martini and the assembled energy of belated parental authority. The man — Gio — shook his head.
"No, no — Mrs. Tenenbaum, I wasn't looking where I was going. I walked right into her. Ain't that right, Sue?"
And little Sue, bless her, nodded with the solemnity of someone who has just been offered a gift and understood enough to accept it.
"Sorry, Mr. Gelati."
Mr. Gelati. As in, that kind of Gelati. Mob Gelati. Investing-in-Anavrin-to-launder-their-money Gelati.
"Aw, s'okay, Susie."
Mrs. Tenenbaum took Susan firmly by the hand and steered her toward the bathroom.
The party resumed around him.
And Gio Gelati — her brain had filed the name with a precise little click — stood alone in the small wreckage of the moment, napkin in hand, and did what she was already beginning to understand was simply his nature: he cleaned it up. Unhurried. Unresentful.
Tidying the broken glass to the side with the matter-of-fact efficiency of a man who finished what he started and didn't require an audience for it. Perhaps a lesser man would’ve left the mess for a custodial staff. A lesser man would’ve shouted at the young girl.
And yet… he, as Love suspected, was not that sort of man.
Then he looked up.
And found her. He found her staring.
For a moment neither of them moved. He blinked once.
Then he smiled.
Not loaded. Not a gambit or a trick. Just the smile of a man who had caused a small scene at a party and was willing to be cheerful about it, offered freely, without agenda, to the woman who had apparently been watching.
Here we are, the smile said. I know. It's fine.
She smiled back.
He looked away first.
And then he looked away, crouching to collect the larger pieces of glass from the floor with the focused practicality of someone who had decided that the least he could do was clean it up.
Then someone called his name from across the room — one of the younger Gelati men, his cousin maybe, gesturing — and he went.
Love watched him go for a moment longer.
Gio, she thought. Gio Gelati.
Joe had been a current.
That was the only word she'd ever found for it. Something you felt before you understood it, a charge that rearranged the air in a room, that made everything before it seem slightly underlit by comparison. She'd felt it across this very store, the first time, and she'd followed it for nearly two years through everything it led to. The best of it and the worst of it. All the way to a kitchen table in Madre Linda and a choice she was, daily, still making her peace with.
Love was not feeling a current.
She had noticed a man be kind to a child at a party. She had noticed his name. She had noted, in the entirely neutral and professional capacity of a woman whose business was now entangled with his family's money, that he seemed — different, from the others. Softer, somehow. Less at home in the room he was standing in.
Love had noted it.
She was not going to do anything with it. She was not going to file it away alongside the laugh and the crouch and the napkin and the smile that had meant nothing more than what it was.
She was not going to do anything.
Love lifted her champagne to her lips, eyes still on the young man from across the room.
...
Hello, you.