Chapter 6: Through the Door

Nobody drank.

Three hundred glasses stayed in the air, and nobody drank.

The accordion player looked at his shoes.

Then Luciano picked up his own glass.

"To my wife," he said, in that low voice from the altar. "Who keeps a secret better than anyone in this room."

He looked straight down the head table at his uncle.

"And to my uncle, who reads."

Somebody laughed.

Then everybody drank, fast.

Raimondo smiled and sipped and sat down.

We left twenty minutes later.

In the car Luciano didn't say a word.

He held my hand on the seat between us, and his thumb kept moving over my knuckles.

The house in Chestnut Hill was dark except for one lamp in the hall.

Nonna had gone to bed.

Somebody had carried my two suitcases up to a pretty blue room at the end of the hall, with a window over the garden.

His room was directly across.

Page three.

"Goodnight, Siobhan," he said at his door.

"Goodnight."

We both went in.

We both shut our doors.

I lasted ten minutes.

I sat on the edge of the bed in a yellow wedding dress I couldn't unzip by myself.

I listened to him not sleeping across the hall.

At 11:40 I went and sat on the floor in the hallway with my back against his door.

"Are you awake?" I said.

The floorboards creaked on the other side.

Then his voice, low, close to the wood.

"I'm always awake. You know that."

"Nightshift."

"Yes."

He sat down too.

I heard his back settle against the door, right behind mine.

It was the strangest thing.

It was exactly like the messages.

The dark, his voice, nothing to look at.

"Tell me the rule," I said. "The real one. Not the book one."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Oops, My Online Ex Is the Mafia Don from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.