Chapter 8: The Heir Ceremony

The gate guard knew me before I had taken off my sunglasses.

He was the young man who had stood at the front door the night I died.

He looked at me, then at the boy on my hip.

His radio slid out of his hand and hit the gravel.

"Signora," he said.

"Open it."

"The Don is in the middle of a ceremony, I can't let you in."

"I know what he's in the middle of," I said. "Open the gate."

He opened it.

I walked up the long drive in my gray coat with Luca's arms around my neck.

I had told myself in the car that I would not cry, and I did not.

Mauro was dead, and my son had no name.

I meant to give him one in front of every man at that table.

The ceremony was on the back lawn, under a white tent.

There were two hundred chairs in rows.

The whole household stood along the sides, the housekeepers and the cooks and the drivers.

The five families sat at the front in their dark suits.

I came in at the back, and for a few steps no one turned around.

Ottavio stood at a podium with a microphone, and his voice carried across the grass.

"Don Barone has been blessed twice," he said warmly. "Once in his marriage, and once, though he did not know it, in this boy."

Beside him stood Nadia in a cream dress, with the boy in a tiny black suit holding her hand.

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