“You’re the Only Name She Says!” — One Call Makes the Mafia Boss Freeze

HE DIDN’T BREAK WHEN MEN PUT GUNS TO HIS HEAD—BUT ONE BLOKEN CALL BROUGHT HIM TO HIS KNEES

The phone hit the marble floor so hard the screen split like ice.

For thirty years, Dante Romano had trained himself not to flinch. Then a stranger’s voice said a nurse had been shot, and the only name she kept repeating through the blood was his.

That was when the most feared man in New York stopped being untouchable.

The phone landed faceup near the leg of his desk, still glowing, still alive, still carrying the thin, strained voice of a woman who had no idea what kind of man she had just called.

Dante Romano stared at it for half a second too long.

In his office on the thirty-second floor of Romano Tower, the city spread beyond the glass in hard silver lines, late traffic crawling under a bruised New York sky. Behind him, the bar cart gleamed. To his left, a gun sat inside the top drawer of his desk. In the hallway outside, three men waited for orders about a shipment coming through Red Hook before midnight. Everything in his life was exactly where it belonged.

Except his heart.

The nurse on the other end of the line cleared her throat. “Sir? Are you still there?”

Dante bent down, picked up the cracked phone, and pressed it back to his ear.

“Say it again.”

His voice came out low. Controlled. It was the same voice he used in private rooms when men were deciding whether to lie to him or live.

“She had your number in her pocket,” the nurse said. “Folded up. She’s been in and out since the paramedics brought her in. Through the pain, through all of it, she keeps saying your name. Over and over. Just your name.”

Dante closed his eyes.

A folded piece of paper. Carried in a pocket. His number on it.

There were maybe twelve people in the city who had that number. Maybe fewer. He had never written it down for anyone outside his world. Not once. Not in blue pen on a scrap of paper. Not for a stranger. Not for a woman.

“What’s her name?” he asked, though something dark and certain had already settled into his bones.

A pause. Papers rustling.

“Elena Vasquez.”

The room tilted.

Not outwardly. Nothing dramatic. No hand to the chest. No shouted curse. No chair kicked over.

Just a tiny shift inside him, deep and lethal, like a fault line splitting under granite.

Because Elena Vasquez was not supposed to know his number.

Elena Vasquez was not supposed to know him at all.

He remembered a February night on the downtown 6. Her scrubs. No coat. The way she had smiled after he draped his own coat over her shoulders because she had given hers to a homeless man two stops earlier and refused to take it back.

I’m Elena, she had said, her breath clouding in the stale subway air. What’s your name?

Dante, he had answered, and nothing else.

No last name. No card. No promise. He had gotten off three stops later and spent eight months pretending he had forgotten her face.

Now a stranger was telling him she was bleeding out and calling his name like a prayer.

“Which hospital?” he asked.

“St. Mary’s. Tenth Avenue entrance. Trauma bay four, but they’re moving her up to surgery. Sir, she’s lost a lot of blood.”

“I’m on my way.”

He hung up. He did not take his coat from the back of the chair. He did not take the gun from the desk. He walked out of the office with the broken phone still in his hand and a look on his face his staff had never seen.

Marco Bellini was waiting by the elevator.

Marco had been Dante’s right hand for twelve years. He had seen Dante walk away from shootings, indictments, and funerals without changing his breathing. He had seen him close deals while men screamed in the next room. He had seen him tell a federal prosecutor to go to hell with a smile polite enough for church.

He had never seen him like this.

“Boss?”

“Drive.”

Marco moved before the second syllable left Dante’s mouth. He stepped into the elevator with him just as the doors closed.

“Where?”

“St. Mary’s.”

Marco looked at the cracked phone. Then at Dante’s face. Then at the phone again.

“Who’s dead?”

Dante stared at his reflection in the brushed steel elevator wall. Forty-two years old. Silver at the temples. Black shirt open at the throat. Eyes older than the rest of him.

“Nobody’s dead yet,” he said. “And nobody’s going to be.”

They came out of the garage on Fifty-First at seventy miles an hour. Marco took corners like the old days, before towers and boardrooms and legitimate holdings, when their nights were measured in alleyways and who made it back to the car.

The city blurred.

Taxis. Delivery vans. Pedestrians crossing against the light. Neon reflected in rain-black asphalt.

For three blocks, neither man spoke.

Then Marco said, quieter now, “Who is she?”

Dante didn’t answer at first.

“She’s a nurse,” he said finally.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Her name is Elena Vasquez.”

Marco’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

In twelve years, Dante had never said a woman’s full name in that car. Never with that kind of quiet in his mouth.

“Who is she really?”

Dante watched red lights bloom and vanish over Ninth Avenue.

“She’s… someone I met once.”

“Once.”

“Yes.”

“And she’s got your private number in her pocket.”

“Yes.”

Marco let out a breath through his nose. Long. Controlled. The sound a man makes when the shape of the problem gets worse instead of better.

“Okay,” he said. “Then somebody wanted you out of your tower tonight.”

Dante turned his head slowly.

“Exactly.”

The emergency room at St. Mary’s was what all emergency rooms in New York looked like after ten p.m.—too bright, too tired, full of pain nobody had time to process.

A child was crying near the vending machines. A drunk man was shouting at a security guard. A mother in pink scrubs was rocking a baby that did not belong to her. Two police officers stood against a far wall waiting for a statement from someone too sedated to give one.

Dante walked in, and the room changed.

Not because he announced himself.

He didn’t.

He simply crossed to the front desk, put both hands flat on the counter, and said, “Elena Vasquez. I was called.”

The woman behind the glass barely looked up from the keyboard. “Are you family, sir?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your relationship?”

Dante looked at her.

“Yes,” he said again.

That time she looked up properly.

And when she looked up, she saw him. Not just his face. The shape of him. The man behind him. The way two security guards had already changed direction without being asked. The kind of stillness around him that said the usual rules had stopped applying.

“One moment,” she said.

Within thirty seconds, a nurse in pale blue scrubs was walking toward them with a clipboard.

“Mr. Romano? I’m Diane. I’m the one who called.”

Dante followed her down a corridor that smelled of bleach, coffee, and old panic.

“She came in at nine seventeen,” Diane said. “Single gunshot wound to the upper abdomen. She lost consciousness in the ambulance. They brought her back. Vitals are holding, but they’re taking her into surgery now.”

“Where was she shot?”

“Forty-Seventh and Eighth. Outside her building, I think.”

Dante stopped walking.

Diane took two more steps before she realized he wasn’t beside her anymore.

“Sir?”

“Forty-Seventh and Eighth,” Dante repeated.

“Yes.”

“That’s two blocks from my building.”

The nurse blinked.

“I—sir, I don’t know anything about that.”

“She lives two blocks from me.”

Dante put one hand flat against the hospital wall, the cool paint under his palm the only solid thing in the hallway. Marco stepped closer instinctively.

“Boss.”

“I’m fine.”

“You are not fine.”

Diane, to her credit, did not ask further questions. She led them to a small waiting area outside the surgical floor—three plastic chairs, a muted television, a vending machine humming like a bad thought.

“The surgery will take at least two hours,” she said. “Maybe three. I’ll come find you the moment there’s news.”

Then she hesitated. Not because she was afraid. Because she was choosing whether to say something she probably shouldn’t.

“Mr. Romano,” she said softly. “She talked about you.”

Dante looked up.

“What?”

“Not tonight. Before. Weeks ago. Months ago. We work the same shift most nights. She told me once about a man on the subway who gave her his coat when she was cold. She said he was quiet. She said he had sad eyes. She said his name was Dante.”

Dante did not breathe.

“She thought about you,” Diane said.

The words moved through him slowly, like blood returning to a limb that had been numb too long.

He remembered the subway exactly now. The shape of her mouth when she smiled. The way her fingers had gripped the lapels of his coat like it was something precious, not borrowed. The way she had said, I hope I see you again someday.

He had thought about her every week since.

Apparently, she had thought about him too.

Marco returned from the vending machine with two paper cups of coffee and shoved one into Dante’s hand.

“Drink,” he said.

Dante drank. The coffee was terrible. Burned. Bitter. He swallowed it anyway.

“Boss,” Marco said, keeping his voice low. “You never gave her your number, right?”

“No.”

“Then whoever put that number in her pocket did it on purpose.”

Dante looked down at the paper cup in his hand.

“Yes.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning somebody wanted me here.”

At that exact moment, the game show on the muted television flashed a woman spinning a wheel, laughing under studio lights while her family cheered behind her.

Dante stared at the screen without seeing it.

“Meaning,” he said, “somebody shot an innocent woman to drag me out of my office.”

Marco sat back slowly.

“And whoever did that knows you well enough to know you’d come.”

Dante did not answer. He didn’t need to.

Marco already knew.

The first crack in the night came nine minutes later.

Marco had one of their men pull the staff roster. The receptionist at the front desk—the woman who had first spoken to them, the one with the name tag that said Maria—was not Maria. Maria was fifty-eight, from Staten Island, and had called out sick at four.

The woman behind the desk when Dante walked in did not exist in hospital staffing.

By the time Marco went looking for her, she was gone.

“She was there to confirm you showed up,” Marco said.

Dante stood very still.

“She was there to watch me walk in,” he corrected.

“Looks like.”

“And whoever sent her now knows I’m staying here.”

“Yeah.”

“And knows I’m unarmed.”

Marco didn’t say yes. He didn’t have to.

Dante looked toward the double doors of the surgical floor. Then he pulled out his phone.

“Call everyone,” he said. “I want eyes on every exit of this hospital. Roof. Garage. Service hallways. And nobody gets near her room unless we know exactly who they are.”

Marco nodded and stepped outside to make the calls.

Dante sat back down.

A young nurse came through a side hallway holding a clear plastic bag.

“Mr. Romano?”

“Yes.”

“These are her personal effects.”

He took the bag.

Inside: a worn wallet, a set of keys with a silver angel charm, a cracked phone, a name tag that read Elena V., Pediatrics, a bent paperback novel, and a folded square of paper.

Dante opened the bag with careful hands and unfolded the note.

His private number was written there in blue ballpoint pen in his own handwriting.

He had never written that number down in his life.

Not once.

On the back, in the same forged hand, were four words.

If lost call Dante.

He folded the paper back up and slipped it into the inside pocket of his shirt, over his heart.

Then he waited.

While he waited, the office phone on the thirty-second floor of Romano Tower began to ring.

And ring.

And keep ringing.

Vincent was already in the building by the time Marco called him. Dante spoke to him from the hospital waiting room while the surgical doors stayed shut and the world kept making ordinary noises around extraordinary fear.

“Is anything on my desk that wasn’t there when I left?” Dante asked.

A pause. Footsteps. A drawer sliding open and closed.

“There’s an envelope on your chair,” Vincent said. “White. Unsealed.”

“Don’t open it.”

Another pause.

“Boss. I already did.”

Dante shut his eyes.

“What’s in it?”

“A photograph.”

“Of what?”

“You. On a subway. Putting your coat around a woman’s shoulders.”

The blood drained out of Dante’s hands.

“There’s another one behind it. You outside the coffee shop on Fifty-Second last Tuesday. Looking across the street. At her.”

Marco, listening beside him, swore softly under his breath.

“Any note?”

“Sticky note on the back of the second one.”

“What does it say?”

Vincent read carefully.

“Does she know what you are yet?”

The waiting room seemed to go soundless.

Not quiet.

Soundless.

Like the world had pulled back three inches from him.

Someone had watched him for eight months.

Someone had seen him looking for her before he had admitted to himself that he was looking.

Someone had taken a woman who mattered and wrapped her in a trap built exactly to fit the shape of his one unguarded instinct.

“Vincent,” Dante said, voice steady now in the worst way, “put everything back exactly the way you found it. Lock my office. Stand outside the door. Nobody goes in.”

“Yes, boss.”

He hung up.

Marco was watching him carefully.

“Who knows enough to do this?”

Dante looked at the plastic bag of Elena’s things. At the angel keychain. The cracked screen of her phone. The paperback with the bent spine.

“Not many,” he said.

“Names.”

Dante gave them.

Marco.

Vincent.

Sal.

Tommy Dalvo.

Leo Castellano.

Father Johnny.

And after a pause long enough to feel like betrayal arriving in slow motion, Dante added a seventh.

“Don Calogero.”

Marco turned fully in his chair.

“Boss, come on.”

“He’s on the list.”

“He’s eighty-one years old.”

“He’s on the list.”

“He’s your godfather.”

Dante’s face did not move.

“He’s on the list.”

Marco stopped arguing.

Twelve years was long enough to know when a man was beyond argument and deep inside consequence.

The surgeon came out at 2:41 in the morning with blood on one cuff and exhaustion in his posture.

“She’s alive,” he said.

Dante stood before the last syllable left the doctor’s mouth.

“The bullet missed the artery by about the width of a nickel. There was a lot of damage, but we repaired it. The next twelve hours matter. If she gets through them without complications, she’ll live.”

Dante put one hand on the back of the plastic chair beside him. Not because he was going to fall. Because he needed something to hold that wasn’t a gun or an order or his own throat.

“Thank you,” he said.

“She’ll be in the ICU. Family can see her in about thirty minutes.”

“Whatever she needs,” Dante said. “For the rest of her life, send it to me.”

The doctor looked at him for one long second, then chose the oldest courtesy in medicine—pretending not to hear the part he wasn’t supposed to hear.

When Dante finally stepped into her room, Elena looked smaller than memory.

That was the first thing.

Not fragile. Not weak. Just smaller. Human-sized. Mortal. Tubes in her arms. Tube down her throat. Machine breathing for her. Hair pushed back from her forehead by someone in a hurry. Bruise darkening along the edge of her jaw that probably had more to do with the pavement than the bullet.

Dante stood in the doorway for a long time.

Then he sat beside her.

He didn’t touch her at first. He was afraid to feel how cold she was. Afraid the reality of her body under white sheets would undo something in him he had never learned how to put back together.

“Hi,” he said.

The machine breathed for her.

“I don’t know if you can hear me. They tell me you can.”

The machine breathed for her.

“I’m sorry it took me eight months to come find you.”

He set two fingers on the back of her hand.

Her skin was warm.

Not enough to comfort him. Enough to keep him breathing.

“You gave a homeless man your coat,” he whispered. “Who does that, Elena?”

The machine answered for her.

“You do,” he said. “That’s who.”

He sat there for nineteen minutes with his fingers on her hand and said nothing else until Sal opened the door and held out his phone.

A text. Burner number.

Tell your boss the girl’s awake in five years or she’s dead in five minutes. His choice. He’ll understand.

Dante read it twice.

Of course he understood.

Whoever sent it had studied him from the inside. Not the public myth of him. The private architecture. The one rule everything in his life had been built around.

I decide who lives.

Now someone had used that rule on him.

Your choice.

The old knife, turned.

“Move her,” Dante said.

Sal frowned. “Boss, she’s ventilated.”

“Move her.”

He wanted whoever was watching the room to see an empty bed. He wanted panic. Panic made mistakes. Panic made calls. Calls made trails.

Within minutes, Elena was transferred upstairs to a private unnumbered room under a false name with Dr. Shu cooperating because some men built empires with bullets and some with donations and sometimes both bought the same silence.

Then the next break came.

Vincent enlarged the coffee shop photo. In the reflection of the storefront window, half obscured by glare, was the man who had taken it.

Late fifties. Silver hair combed back. Glasses. Scar above the right eyebrow.

Dante looked at the face and the hallway around him went thin and far away.

“Who is that?” Marco asked.

Dante’s mouth had gone dry.

“Enzo Marchetti,” he said.

Marco blinked.

“Never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have.”

“Why?”

“Because he died nineteen years ago.”

He had been at the funeral. He had carried the casket. He had kissed the coffin.

And now Enzo Marchetti was standing in a storefront reflection across from Dante on a Tuesday morning taking photographs of him watching Elena walk by.

Marco went to Brooklyn that night.

He went to Don Calogero’s house on Bay Eighteenth. He walked past the marble table with the bowl of rosary beads. He kissed the old man on both cheeks the way he always had. He sat in the empty chair across from a half-full glass of wine that was not his.

And when he asked, Is Enzo Marchetti alive?

Don Calogero’s face didn’t move.

But his eyes did.

Just for one heartbeat. Just enough.

Marco came back pale.

“Boss,” he said, “your godfather knows. He’s known the whole time. Enzo was in the house while I was there. I saw his shadow in the next room.”

Dante turned away and put his hand flat against the wall.

Not because he was weak.

Because even steel has a point where it needs something outside itself to hold the shape.

He had been taught by Don Calogero from the age of twelve that men who lived longest loved nothing. That love was leverage. That tenderness was a loaded gun somebody else eventually fired at your face.

For thirty years, Dante had believed him.

Now Elena lay upstairs breathing through pain, and Enzo Marchetti was alive, and Don Calogero had lied for nineteen years, and the entire architecture of Dante’s life had cracked in one night.

He called Senator Whitmore before sunrise.

Not because he respected him. Because he understood him.

He left the message calm enough to sound polite.

By noon, David Crane was under federal arrest at Teterboro. By late afternoon, the senator’s daughter was in a private treatment facility under a false name. By evening, an irrevocable trust had been established to cover Elena Vasquez’s medical expenses for the rest of her life.

Power recognized power.

Fear translated faster than law.

Elena woke the next morning.

The tube was out by then. Her voice came back rough, scraped raw by the machine.

She looked around the room. Then at Dante.

For one long second, there was no recognition at all.

Then she said, “You’re the subway guy.”

Dante laughed once. Short. Shaky. Like the sound surprised even him.

“Yeah.”

She looked at the clock.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“About ten hours.”

Her eyes narrowed faintly.

“That’s dramatic.”

“I’ve had a dramatic night.”

She studied him. Not the suit, not the name, not the mythology that had already started gathering around the edges of the room. Him.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Dante took a breath.

“My name is Dante Romano. I own some buildings. I employ some people. I have enemies. One of those enemies hired someone to shoot you because of something you saw in this hospital.”

Elena frowned slowly. Carefully. She was still pale. Still hurting. But her eyes were working.

“October,” she said after a while. “Obstetrics.”

“Yes.”

“The senator’s daughter.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes.

“I made a copy of her file because I was worried nobody would follow up. I wrote a note on the front. If she calls, be kind. She is afraid.”

“I know.”

Elena opened her eyes again and looked down at his hand wrapped around hers.

“What kind of man are you, Dante?”

He was quiet for so long she almost smiled.

Then he said, “I’m the kind of man who was told at twelve that loving anything gets it killed. And I believed it for thirty years.”

She listened without interrupting.

“I organized my whole life around that lie,” he said. “No friends I didn’t employ. No women I let close enough to remember. No softness anybody could use. Then I met a woman on the subway who gave a homeless man her coat in a snowstorm, and I spent eight months pretending I wasn’t thinking about her. And then somebody shot her to get me out of my office.”

He looked up.

“I realized the lie all at once.”

Elena’s face softened.

Then, very gently, she reached up and put her hand against his jaw.

“You are not twelve anymore,” she said. “A grown man does not get to hide behind what someone told him when he was scared.”

Dante closed his eyes for one second under her hand.

“You are allowed to throw the lie away,” she whispered.

He opened his eyes.

“I have enemies, Elena.”

“I know.”

“They will know about you.”

“They already do.”

“You could die because of me.”

She smiled then. Small. Crooked on the left side. The same smile from the subway.

“I’m a pediatric nurse, Dante. I hold dying babies. I tell parents the worst thing they will ever hear and then I come back the next morning and do it again because somebody has to. I am not delicate.”

He stared at her.

She squeezed his hand.

“Now tell me the truth.”

He swallowed.

“I love you.”

No evasion. No negotiation. No delay. No elegant phrasing to blunt the wound.

Just the truth.

Elena held his gaze for a long moment.

Then she said, “I know.”

His mouth opened.

She smiled again.

“I knew in February.”

The laugh that came out of him then was not like any sound Marco had ever heard from him. It was rough and disbelieving and too alive for the room it came out in.

“Took you long enough, Romano,” she said.

He bent forward and pressed his forehead to the back of her hand.

Two days later, they moved her upstate to a private recovery facility overlooking the Hudson.

Diane came with her for the first three days because Elena asked and Diane said yes. Sal set men on every road and every roof and every hallway until the fear began to thin into vigilance instead of panic. Vincent built a paper wall around her—trusts, lawyers, ownership transfers, shell companies turned inside out and pointed now at protection instead of concealment.

Dante tried once to tell Elena he wanted to send her away after recovery. Somewhere safer. Somewhere unfindable.

She put down her spoon and looked at him like she was embarrassed for him.

“No.”

“Elena—”

“No.”

“Elena, listen—”

“No, Dante, you listen. I am a grown woman with a lease and a mother in the Bronx and a job I love. You are not putting me in some beautiful cage and telling me it is for my own good.”

He looked at her.

“You’re afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

“Not Enzo,” she said softly. “Me.”

The room went still.

He turned away first. Not because she was wrong. Because she wasn’t.

She let him sit with that for a while.

Then she said, “If you want to keep me safe, don’t send me away. Teach me the truth. Let me know the room I’m standing in.”

So he did.

Not all of it at once. But enough.

He told her which names mattered. Which doors were never just doors. Which men smiled before they lied and which lied without needing to smile. He told her how to read fear in expensive shoes, and she told him how to read pain in people who insisted they were fine.

He bought her mother yellow roses for the first Sunday dinner.

Her mother hated him for eighteen minutes.

Then he ate three helpings of arroz con pollo and answered every question she asked without flinching, and by dessert she was calling him too thin and telling him to sit straighter.

Elena laughed so hard she had to put down her fork.

Dante looked at her across that small Bronx kitchen table and understood something he had not understood in all his years of power.

A man could own buildings, ports, judges, votes, and still never know what it meant to be invited to stay.

Enzo Marchetti died three weeks later in a motel room upstate.

The details do not matter.

What matters is that Dante walked in alive and walked out alive, and Enzo did not walk out at all.

This time, Dante did not carry the casket.

Don Calogero died four months after that, in his leather armchair, the chessboard still open in front of him. Natural causes, the doctors said. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Dante stood at the funeral in the rain and did not cry.

Elena stood beside him on a cane she still needed some days. Her hand in his. Her body still healing, but upright. Present. Real.

When the last prayer ended, Dante walked away from the grave without looking back.

Some men deserve mourning.

Some deserve silence.

Whitmore did not run for reelection. His daughter finished treatment, moved to Vermont, and opened a bookstore near a college town where nobody knew her last name. David Crane is serving twenty-two years in federal prison. He receives no visitors.

Marco is still Dante’s right hand.

Vincent is still the one who finds what everyone else misses.

Sal still moves like a shadow in hallways that were built for normal people and finds ways to make them belong to someone else.

And Elena Vasquez went back to pediatrics.

Of course she did.

The first week she returned, she wore a bulletproof panel sewn into the lining of her coat and pretended not to know it was there. She worked double shifts by the second month. By the third, she was staying late again to sing to frightened children because pain had not made her smaller. It had only made her more precise about what mattered.

Dante started meeting her at the hospital after midnight.

At first because of security.

Then because he liked the drives home.

Then because one night she fell asleep in the passenger seat with one hand wrapped around the coffee cup he had bought her, and he sat parked outside her building for twenty minutes after they arrived just watching her breathe, and he understood he was done pretending anything in his life was temporary.

A year later, on another cold night in another city that never really sleeps, Elena found him standing by the window of his apartment with a folded piece of paper in his hand.

The fake note.

If lost call Dante.

He still kept it.

Not because he loved what it meant.

Because he loved what survived it.

She came up behind him quietly and slid both arms around his waist.

“You’re thinking too loudly again,” she said.

He covered her hands with his.

“Yeah.”

“You want to tell me?”

He looked out at the city.

Then he turned around and handed her the paper.

She read the forged words. She read them slowly, even though she had seen them before. Then she folded the paper back up and slipped it into his shirt pocket, the same place he had put it on the worst night of his life.

“Why do you still keep it?” she asked.

Dante looked down at her.

“Because that’s the night somebody tried to use you to break me,” he said. “And it’s the same night I found out I still could be broken. Which means it’s also the night I found out I was still alive.”

Elena rose on her toes and kissed him once. Soft. Certain.

Behind them, the city went on being the city—sirens, light, money, hunger, steel, ambition, the endless machinery of people hurting each other and loving each other and pretending those two things were not often neighbors.

But inside that room, none of that mattered for one perfect second.

Because a dangerous man who had been taught that loving anything was weakness had learned too late and just in time that the right person does not make you weak.

They give you something worth surviving as yourself for.

And in the end, that was the thing nobody had ever told him: the people who teach you not to love are usually the ones most afraid of what love will expose.