He Faked My Death, So I Let My Family Bury Me novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: The Envelope

Gaspare did not move.

I watched his hand at his side, and I saw the fingers curl, one at a time, into a fist.

For the length of a breath, I thought he would break Ficarra's neck at my coffin in front of two hundred people.

Then the fist opened.

"Even," Gaspare said.

His voice was perfectly flat.

Ficarra smiled, and bowed to the coffin, and walked back down the aisle the way he had come.

The doors closed behind him.

Nobody in the chapel breathed until the sound of his car had gone.

I sat in the last pew with my nails in my palms.

Now we are even.

He had lost a wife, and now my husband had lost one.

That was all it needed to mean.

But he had said it too calmly, and I could not stop turning the words over.

The pallbearers lifted the coffin.

They carried it down the side aisle to the crypt, with the family behind it, and the crowd drifted out into the cypress garden for coffee and the long line of condolences.

"Signora," Nella said. "We should go."

"Not yet."

I stood, pulled the veil down to my chin, and went out through the side door with my handbag held against my ribs.

The garden was full of black.

Women stood in clusters under the cypress trees, and men smoked in silence at the wall, and over everything lay the smell of wet stone and old roses.

At the end of the garden, my father stood in the condolence line with my mother at his arm.

Each guest took his hand and spoke a few words.

He bowed his head to each one, and he said grazie, and grazie, and grazie.

I stopped behind a stone angel and watched him from forty feet away.

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