Chapter 14: Your Father's Chair

Cesare drove us out of Bridgeport with both hands on the wheel and said nothing for a long stretch of road.

The dog slept across my knees.

"Husband," he said at last.

"It got us through the door."

"It put one of your father's captains at the host's right hand."

"That was already bought before we sat down," I said. "Your title had nothing to do with it."

He kept his eyes on the road.

His knuckles were pale on the wheel, the left one scarred across the top.

"Say it again," he said.

"Which part?"

"The word."

I looked at his profile in the light of the passing streetlamps.

"Husband," I said.

He pulled over under a bare tree on a dark side street and put the car in park.

He did not touch me.

He sat there breathing, and I watched his throat move.

"Take me home, Cesare," I said. "My home."

He pulled out again, faster.

The pad at the Lincoln Park door glowed green under my thumb, and the lock clicked open at once.

I stood in my own front hall at ten at night, with nobody's permission to ask.

The dog trotted up the stairs.

I took Cesare's hand and led him the other way, down the hall to a door I had not opened since the funeral.

My father's study smelled of leather, old paper and the cigars he had smoked with the window shut.

The big oak desk still stood in front of the window, and his chair was pushed in behind it.

Cesare stopped in the doorway.

"Renata. This is his room."

"It's mine now."

I turned on one small lamp.

I pulled the chair out from the desk and turned it to face the room.

"Sit."

"I'm not sitting in your father's chair."

"He put you in the third seat of his table," I said. "You can sit in his chair for ten minutes."

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