The Don's Wife Stopped Asking novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: The Ledger
I came home at a quarter to midnight with the green ledger under my coat.
Every light on the ground floor was on.
Tancredi sat on the bottom stair in his shirtsleeves.
His car keys lay on the hall table beside him, where I could see them.
He stood up when I came in.
"You said midnight," he said.
"It's a quarter to."
"I know." His voice was rough. "I've been looking at the clock since eight."
I walked past him without a word, into his study.
I put the ledger on his desk, on the exact spot where I had lain two nights before, and I opened it to my father's page.
"Read it," I said.
He came in after me.
He stood at the desk, and he did not sit.
He read the page once, and then he turned the leaf and read the next one, and then he went back to the first.
His hand came down flat on the paper.
I had never seen it shake.
"Where did you get this?"
"From a woman whose husband was afraid of it."
"Sabina."
"Say it. I want to hear you say it."
"There was no debt," he said.
"No."
"Your father paid every cent."
"For nine years."
He stood with his hand on the page, and a muscle went in his cheek, and then in his throat.
"My uncle put you in front of me at the altar and said it was done," he said. "My father was already sick, and my uncle ran everything. I took what I was handed."
"And you didn't ask."
"I never asked for a thing in my life."
"That's the difference between us." I said it flat. "I asked you for three years."
He turned.
His grey eyes were wet, and he did not look away.
"I locked your door because he would have told you something," he said. "Your brother. I told you that."
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