I Left the Underboss for the Man Who Remembered Me novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Page Four

My father was propped up against three pillows with an oxygen tube under his nose and his thin white hair sticking up on one side.

He looked small.

I had never once seen him look small.

"Gianna," he said, and his hand came up off the sheet, shaking, and I took it.

"Papa."

"Come here. You're too far."

I sat on the edge of the bed.

His eyes went past me to the door, where Ettore stood with his cap in both hands.

"You too, Bruni. In the room. I'm not dead yet."

Ettore came and stood at the foot of the bed.

"They told me everything," my father said. "The nurse. The cook. Two of the captains came in the afternoon and thought I was asleep." His breath rattled. "I heard what you did at the dinner. I heard about the cake."

"Papa, I."

"I pledged you to that family the day you were born." He looked at the ceiling. "I held you in a blanket and I signed a paper, and I told myself a father does what keeps his child safe. I was wrong. I'm sorry."

I had waited twenty-three years to hear him say it.

I had imagined a hundred ways it would happen, and in none of them did I cry.

"It's all right," I said.

"It isn't. But thank you."

"Papa, the letter. Aurelio's law. He says I walked out first, and the docks are his."

"He would." A dry smile moved his mouth. "He wrote the clause, and he thinks he wrote all of it. He never read page four."

"What's on page four?"

"What I put there myself."

He asked for water, and I held the cup.

"One line, in my own hand," he said. "That whichever house shames the other first before the Families is the breaching house, and loses the docks.

"No clause above it overrides it. Aurelio signed it without looking, and four captains signed under him as witnesses."

He closed his eyes.

I looked at Ettore.

He looked back, with a face I had never seen on him, a kind of astonished joy.

"The old captain by the window," I said. "The one who stood up at the hall."

"Yes. He was one of the four. His copy is in the safe at his parish."

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