I Vanished with the Don's True Heir novel · Chapter 4 of 32

Chapter 4: The Bracelet

"Yes," I said. "I think so. In the tea."

Orsola nodded once.

Then she opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out a cigar box.

Inside were receipts, a rosary with a broken chain, and a strip of yellowed plastic.

She laid the plastic on the desk between us and smoothed it flat.

A hospital bracelet. The typed letters had faded to brown.

FALCONE, ORSOLA. And a date twenty-eight years ago.

"I was four months along," she said. "My husband's sister brought me tea with honey, because I couldn't keep anything down. I lost the baby that night. He knew, and he told me he didn't want to hear about it."

Four lines.

That was all she gave it.

She put the lid back on the box.

I sat there and couldn't feel my hands.

"He said that?" I said. "Those words?"

"Those words."

"Livio said them to Achille. In the hall outside my bed. 'Keep it quiet. I don't want to hear about it.'"

Orsola closed her eyes for a second.

"Like father, like son," she said. "I prayed every night that wouldn't be true."

I was thinking about the honey.

The jar on the counter in the Chestnut Hill kitchen, with the wooden dipper and the gingham cloth tied over the lid.

Every Christmas, Achille carried a case of it up the front steps himself.

"From my mother's people," he always said. "She'd want you to have it."

His mother had been dead four years.

He'd kept bringing the honey anyway.

Everybody said it was sweet.

"Achille brings the honey," I said. "Every year. His mother used to."

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