He Replaced His Wife and Lost His Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: The Pearls Were Never Hers
Domenico stood in the kitchen doorway and did not come in.
"Mrs. Greco," he said to Agnese. "You're a long way from Westchester."
"Mr. Santangelo." She sat down in the third chair without being asked. "I'm seventy-eight. Everywhere is a long way."
She laid one hand on the canvas bag.
"I took these off the table while my grandson was shouting at the captains. Nobody looks at an old woman with a shopping bag."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because they're yours."
She looked at my bandaged hand again, and then at my neck, where nothing hung.
"Sit down, girl. I came to say something about the pearls."
I sat.
"Nobody ever told you whose they were," Agnese said. "Daniele let you think they belong to the wife of the house, and that you'd earned them or you hadn't."
"I never asked for them."
"I know. That was the whole trouble." Her dark eyes did not move off mine. "They're mine. My husband bought them the week we married. Every year Daniele asked to borrow them for the woman in the chair, and every year I said yes, because I kept thinking you would come to me and ask for them yourself."
"Why would I ask you?"
"So I could take them off the other one and put them on you."
I looked down at the table.
I had walked past that strand for five years, and in all that time I had never wanted anything the man could take back.
"I didn't want to owe him," I said.
"You never owed him anything." She reached over and put her knotted hand on my bandaged one. "I should have said it before. I'm sorry."
It was an odd thing to hear in an enemy's kitchen from a woman who had let it happen five times.
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