Wife for Her Salvation

Shirley's father lies critically ill, and her fiancé refuses the emergency funds he once swore to provide. The next day he announces his engagement to Pera, and Shirley becomes a laughingstock. Then her childhood friend Seamus, heir to a long-established Mafia family, kneels in the park and proposes; that night he transfers a large sum, and she accepts at once to pay for her father's treatment. Her father never wakes, and Seamus arranges everything under the family's protection.

Years into their marriage, Shirley overhears Seamus with the doctor who treated her father: he tampered with the organ allocation priority list, delaying her father's transplant so Pera's father could receive an organ in time. He does not regret it. In his study she finds the combination is Pera's birthday, the contracts bound to Pera's interests, and a safe holding thousands of photographs of Pera.

Shirley applies to cancel her legal status, and in three days her name will be erased from Italy. As Seamus promises her a surprise, she smiles and waits.