The Ex-Wife He Lost Forever novel · Chapter 6 of 24
Chapter 6: The Sunday Table
On Sunday the whole Montanari family came to Pine Street to eat, as they had every Sunday for forty years.
Cecilia stood at the top of the stairs in a borrowed black dress and watched them arrive from the window.
Uncles, cousins, their wives, a dozen children.
Twenty-two places were laid along the dining room table.
"You don't have to go down," Zia said behind her.
"If I hide in this room, they'll say they were right."
"Good girl." Zia buttoned the last button at Cecilia's collar with her thick fingers. "Then you go down with your head up, and you sit where Ettore tells you."
The dining room went quiet when she came in.
Every head turned, and then every eye looked away.
Adamo sat halfway down the left side in a dark suit, with a bruise of sleeplessness under each eye.
Simona sat beside him in black lace, thin and tragic, with Santi on her other side.
Simona had taken the chair that had been Cecilia's for three years.
Santi saw her first.
"Aunt Cece!"
He wriggled off his chair, ran around the table, and wrapped both arms around her waist.
He was six, with brown curls and a chin with a little cleft in it, and he smelled like crayons.
"Does your hand hurt?" he whispered. "Mama said you fell down."
"It doesn't hurt anymore," Cecilia said, and touched his hair with her left hand.
"Santi," Simona called. "Come back here, sweetheart."
He went, dragging his feet.
Cecilia stood at the end of the room with no chair.
Ettore rose from the head of the table.
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