After My Four Childhood Friends Abandoned Me, I Inherited a Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Napkin

Nobody ate.

Eighty people stared at the broken dish, and then at the doors Fiamma had run through.

"Ask Nunzio," she had screamed on her way out. "Ask him what he gave Ettore!"

Nunzio had set the bread basket down on the nearest table.

He stood with both hands hanging, and his face was white.

"Counting room," I said.

I said it quietly, and he followed me with his head down.

Ilario came behind us and shut the door.

Nunzio lowered himself onto the cot where he had slept the first night, and he put his face in his hands.

I waited.

I had learned that with Nunzio the answer arrives if you leave a space for it, and it came out in pieces.

"A month before he died," Nunzio said. "Ettore took me to lunch."

"He asked about the Don's pills."

"Which pills?"

"All of them. What they were, what time, which ones the nurse gave and which ones you gave." He wiped his nose on his wrist. "He said he wanted to bring something. A gift. A man who sends a gift needs to know about the medicine."

"And you told him."

"I wrote it on a napkin."

His voice cracked.

"The morning dose, the evening dose, and the one in the middle, the little white one he took with the soup. I wrote that the nurse had Thursdays off. I wrote that you did the Thursday pills."

Ilario had gone completely still by the door.

I thought of the Thursday, and the pill box on the nightstand, and the soup I had carried up on a tray.

"Did you give him anything?" I asked. "Did you bring a gift?"

"No. No, I swear, Marta, I never touched the house. I never saw the Don again after the lunch."

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