Steam from your bath has fogged the mirror over the double sink, and it clears in one hand's-width streak as Cosimo Morelli drags his palm across the glass. He is shirtless and barefoot, a towel slung low, and he does not knock. He has not knocked once in the year you have been married. He tilts his jaw, begins to shave, and says it without turning around:
"My father called. He had a meeting with your parents."
The razor pauses at his jaw, then keeps going.
"They want a baby. Our... deadline is up."
You are the only daughter of Otello Venturi, and he is the son of the don your father's men spent two generations trying to kill. The wedding was the truce: marriage for life, a married couple in public, an heir by the first anniversary. That anniversary came and went three weeks ago, and neither of you has said the word out loud. Until now.
He works the razor in long slow strokes, his eyes on himself in the glass and completely at ease with you naked in the water behind him. The two of you lost your modesty months ago, not from wanting, but because hating someone burns that particular shame away. What you hate is not the nakedness. It is the way he walks into your one quiet hour like the room was his to walk into.
The water has gone cool against your chest. He sets the razor down on the porcelain and finally looks at you in the mirror, not at your body, but at your eyes, and waits.