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“Hmm?” she murmured, her eyes still shut.
“What’s all this?”
Upon hearing my voice, her eyes flew open and she jerked upright. “Lorenzo…”
“Well?”
“Um, I was just looking up a couple of things on the web.” She was hurriedly gathering together the books around her. It was clear she didn’t want me to see them.
I put my large hand firmly over her smaller one, making her stop what she was doing. With my free hand, I turned one of the books around so that I could read the title: ‘Linear Algebra and Applications’.
“I thought you’d already graduated high school?”
“I have.”
I flicked through the pages of the book. “Anyway,” I said slowly, “this looks too advanced for high school.”
Anni didn’t comment.
I looked hard at her. “Explain.”
She lifted her chin. “I’m studying for a college degree.”
“What?”
“I have a brain and I want to use it. My major is in math.”
“And you didn’t think I had a right to know this?”
“It doesn’t affect my duties as your wife.”
“Really?”
“I never study when I’m looking after the children, so it’s not harming them.”
“I’m your husband.” My tone was harsh. “You should have informed me of this and sought my permission instead of sneaking around like this.”
“I’m hardly sneaking around,” she sighed, wearily gathering up her books and heading for the stairs. “I’m too tired to argue about this right now. If you want to talk about it, can we talk in the morning?”
My jaw tightened as she brushed me off. Her refusal to talk to me was just childish.
I felt my shoulders bunch up with tension. I’d always known that she was too young and reckless to be a good wife and mother to my kids, and this just proved it. If her degree wasn’t interfering with her duties, then she wouldn’t have hidden it from me.
CHAPTER 24
ANNUNCIATA
Since Lorenzo had come home and found me asleep over my textbooks, he had been even colder toward me.
He saw it as a personal betrayal that I hadn’t told him about my degree. But I’d known that he would act unreasonably if I mentioned it to him. Plenty of people combined studying with jobs and other responsibilities. I would never compromise my role in taking care of the kids by studying when I was supposed to be watching them—it hurt that he would even think that.
His views were out of the dark ages. That probably shouldn’t have surprised me given that he was a Made Man—they had an archaic view of women, thinking that her sole functions were to be loyal to her man, warm his bed, and produce heirs for him.
The whole virgin sheet tradition was proof of that. The men were free to have sex with as many women as they wanted pre-marriage, while the women had to say pure and untouched for their future husband. And then the woman had the humiliation of having to prove her virginity by showing everyone her virginal blood on the bedsheets. Thank God I hadn’t had to go through the real thing at my wedding, although it had been embarrassing enough at the brunch having everyone looking at the fake blood and talking about it as if it had been mine.
***
A few days later, Lorenzo’s cold attitude to me still hadn’t improved. I had been avoiding doing any college work while he was acting like this, but it meant that I was falling behind on my studies.
