Chapter 14: The Green Book

Nico's POV

I left her asleep at dawn with our daughter's isolette beside her chair and her hand through the lid.

I stood in the bakery doorway for a minute and watched her hold on to the baby in her sleep.

Then I went down the stairs, because someone had to go to the hospital in her place.

She had wanted to go herself.

"Marco will be there," I had told her at four in the morning. "Or his men will, with a car."

"You are the one thing he has not lost yet. Stay with her."

She had looked at me a long time.

"You'll tell me every word," she said.

"Every word."

St. Barnabas had put Silvia on the fourth floor, in a room with the blinds closed.

A Barzini man sat on a chair outside the door.

He was a young one. I had taught him to drive.

"Table's word," I said, and I held up the old Don's ring on its chain. "Go and get coffee."

He went.

Silvia lay propped on three pillows with an IV in her wrist.

Her mother sat in the corner with a rosary and did not look up.

"I asked for Elena," Silvia said.

"She can't leave her family today."

Her face tightened.

"She heard what the doctor said in the chapel," Silvia said. "About the valve. She'll hate me."

"She doesn't think about you at all this morning."

She started to cry, easily, the way she did everything.

"I didn't know," she said. "The doctor told me it was a gift."

"A donor program," she said. "He said Elena had signed for it."

"Silvia."

"I need this baby, Nico. I can't lose this one."

"Then tell me something true, and I'll stand in the hall myself until you're discharged."

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