After My Four Childhood Friends Abandoned Me, I Inherited a Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Eleven Calls

I put the phone down and lay with my eyes open until the window went gray.

Ilario slept on his back with one arm over his head, and the bandage was dry.

I got up and made coffee, and I sat at the kitchen table in his shirt.

When he came down, he stopped in the doorway, and I watched him see that I hadn't slept.

"Whose life is it?" I said.

His face closed.

"Fiamma called me at three. I'm asking anyway."

"Marta."

"I know. Ninety days. You can't say."

I stood up and put the coffee cup in the sink.

"Then you can answer the other thing," I said. "Two years ago, the night my grandfather fell in the kitchen, I called you a dozen times."

He didn't say I was busy.

He pulled out a chair and sat down in it slowly, because of his side.

"I was in Philadelphia," he said. "Your grandfather sent me on an errand that morning. He told me to leave my phone in the glove box and not look at it until I got back."

"Why?"

"He said it was a test of the other crew's man, and I'd be watched."

"And you believed him."

"I'd believed him my whole life."

I stared at him.

"I turned the phone on at five in the morning, in a rest stop. There were twelve calls from you and four from the nurse."

His voice was flat, and he kept his hands still on the table.

"I drove back at a hundred miles an hour. They'd taken him to Saint Barnabas. He was awake in a bed with a tube in his arm, and he looked at me and said, you stay away from her until I'm dead."

"He said that."

"He said you had to learn to stand on your feet without anyone holding you up. He said if I walked into that house, you'd lean on me, and you'd never have to find out how strong you were."

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