Alessandro's divorce was finalized on a Tuesday morning in late October.
He sat in Martin's office at ten AM while his lawyer walked him through the final paperwork with the efficient precision of someone who'd done this hundreds of times. Vanessa had backed off the most aggressive claims after that meeting at the Gramercy Café — the strange, tense conversation where she'd admitted Dante was manipulating both of them and she was tired of being a weapon in someone else's war.
They'd settled. Not amicably, exactly — there was too much history for that, too much resentment and disappointment and the particular bitterness that comes from two people who'd tried to make something work that was never meant to work in the first place. But professionally. With the kind of cold efficiency that successful divorces require.
