My Husband Called Me Useless, Now a Mafia Don Owes Me His Life novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Price

Ada's POV

The results came on Monday morning in a plain white envelope.

Gia's friend the pharmacist handed it to her at the kitchen door and left without a word.

Gia carried it into the study and set it on the desk in front of her brother.

Rocco looked at it for a long time before he touched it.

"Read it," he said to me.

I opened the envelope and took out three pages.

The first was a cover letter.

The second was a long table of numbers with a graph under it, one line rising in steps.

I read the second page twice.

Then I read it out loud, because he had asked me to.

"Hair is measured in segments," I said. "Each segment is about a month of life. The newest segments are closest to the scalp."

Gia sat down.

"His last six segments show arsenic," I said. "Low at first, then higher, then high. It climbs every month for half a year."

"Until the surgery," Rocco said.

"Until the day he died."

Nobody spoke.

I put the page on the desk.

"Your father wasn't dying of a weak heart," I said. "He was being given something to make it fail, a little at a time, so that when he finally needed an operation nobody would be surprised."

Gia put both hands over her face.

Rocco didn't move.

His jaw was tight, and he was looking at the wall above my head.

"Six months," he said.

"Yes."

"Every dinner, I sat across from him."

"You couldn't have known."

"I could have looked at his hands," Rocco said. "You looked at mine."

I had nothing for that.

"There was a page in the chart," I said. "I put it in. Hemoglobin low, nails banded, a heart rhythm I couldn't explain. I asked for a toxicology panel before we opened him."

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