Regrets of the Don: His Beloved Walked Away novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: The Plan

"Her birthday's January 16," Connie said. "A Saturday. She's been planning it since August. Two hundred people and a cake shaped like the house."

"Then we have eight weeks," I said.

Cesare lifted his head off the steel door.

"Eight weeks of what?"

"Of you not touching anyone."

The planning happened in my shop, because I wouldn't go to his house and he wouldn't ask me to.

He came after closing, three nights a week.

He parked the Maserati around the corner on 79th, so the block wouldn't talk.

The block talked anyway.

"Your husband's car is on 79th again," the barber told me every morning, like a weather report.

"He's not my husband."

"Tell his car."

The first night, the family doctor came too.

He was sixty-eight, with a cardigan under his overcoat and a bag that had seen worse than this.

He sat on Nonno's stool and drank the espresso Connie made him and looked at the clips on my laptop without any expression at all.

"A prenatal paternity test," he said. "Very simple. A tube of her blood, any time after eight weeks. A swab from the inside of your cheek, Cesare."

"That's all?"

"That tells you it isn't you." He put the cup down. "If you want a name instead of a no, you need the other man's sample too. Hair won't do. Spit, blood, a cigarette he's had in his mouth."

"And her blood?" I asked. "She won't give it."

"Not to him," the doctor said. "Not to you."

He looked at Cesare over his glasses.

"Your mother takes her to every appointment. Your mother is paying for the good obstetrician on Shore Road. Your mother she'd give a kidney to."

Cesare's jaw went tight.

He hadn't spoken to his mother since the photo in the kitchen.

"Then I tell my mother," he said.

"You tell her," I said. "Out loud. Here. In front of me."

He looked at me for a long second.

"Sunday," he said.

On Sunday his mother came into my shop for the first time in her life.

She wore a mink and an expression.

Connie gave her the stool. She didn't sit on it.

Cesare stood at my counter with his hands flat on Nonno's burn mark.

And he told her.

He gave her the study and the payout without softening either one.

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