The Godfather's Heartbroken Lover novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Fourth Floor

In her aunt's Berlin flat Klara meets the firefighter across the landing, refuses Luca's order to come home, and watches Elettra sell her mother's cake as her own; then she spots Luca's driver parked under the window.

"Your smoke alarm is screaming because it wants a battery, not because you're burning anything," a man said in German.

It was seven in the morning, my second day in Berlin.

He was standing on my aunt's kitchen chair in his socks.

He was very tall, with a short brown beard and a navy jacket that said Feuerwehr on the back.

"Who are you?" I asked, in German.

"Across the landing." He pointed at the door behind me with a screwdriver. "Your aunt calls me every time it beeps. She says I'm the only useful man in the building."

"I'm her niece."

"I know. She told the whole stairwell. The American niece who bakes."

My aunt came out of the bathroom in her robe with a cigarette she wasn't supposed to have.

"Konrad. Leave her alone. She just got dumped by a gangster."

I stared at her.

She shrugged.

"What? You cried for four hours on my sofa. The walls are thin."

Konrad climbed down off the chair.

He looked at me for a second.

"A gangster," he said.

"A very well-dressed one," my aunt said.

"Thank you for the battery," I said. "Please go."

He laughed, a short surprised sound, and went.

A minute later a small girl in a red raincoat knocked on the door.

She was about eight, with a gap in her front teeth and a drawing in her hand.

"Papa says you bake," she said in careful English. "This is a cake. You can make it for me. It costs nothing because I am your neighbor."

The cake in the drawing had eleven layers and a horse on top.

"The horse is extra," I said.

She considered this.

"Okay," she said, and ran back across the landing.

That afternoon I walked into the little bakery on Kastanienallee with the sign in the window.

The owner was an old woman with forearms.

She watched me shape twelve rolls and said, "Four in the morning. Don't be late. Don't cry in the dough."

I started the next day.

I didn't cry in the dough.

I cried on the U-Bahn platform instead, where nobody knew me.

Luca called every night at eleven, which was five in the afternoon in Brooklyn.

I let it ring for six nights.

On the seventh I answered, because I was tired of the sound.

"Klara."

His voice still did something to the back of my neck.

I hated that.

"You've made your point," he said. "Come home."

"I'm not making a point. I live here now."

"You live in your aunt's spare room."

He knew where I was sleeping.

Of course he did.

"Your apartment is waiting," he said. "Your things are where you left them. Come home and we'll talk about the bakery."

"My bakery. That your mother gave to your fiancée."

He was quiet.

"I'll handle my mother."

"You didn't handle her at your birthday."

"Klara." That low voice, the one his captains obeyed. "You're mine. You've been mine for five years. That doesn't end because you got on a plane."

I sat on the edge of my aunt's bathtub with the phone against my ear.

For five years I had loved the way he said that word.

Mine.

Tonight it sounded like a receipt.

"I was never yours, Luca," I said. "I was just there."

I hung up.

He called back four times.

Then a message came, not from him.

Dora.

"Don't look at Instagram."

So I looked at Instagram.

Elettra Valente stood behind the counter of my bakery on Court Street in my striped apron.

Behind her was my oven.

On the shelf above the oven was my mother's recipe book, with its broken spine and its butter stains.

Elettra held a tray of bee-sting cake to the camera.

Golden almond crust. Thick vanilla cream.

My mother's cake.

"Something new for the neighborhood," the caption said. "My grandmother's recipe. Come say hi!"

It had nine hundred likes.

Under it, Annunziata had commented a single red heart.

My aunt came in and read it over my shoulder.

She said a word in German that would have gotten me slapped as a child.

"Your mother brought that recipe over in her suitcase in 1989," she said. "From our mother's kitchen. On Kopenhagener Strasse."

"I know."

"That woman says it's her grandmother's?"

"Yes."

My aunt put out her cigarette in the sink very carefully.

"What are you going to do?"

I didn't know yet.

I went to the window to breathe.

The street below was wet and orange under the lamps.

A black Mercedes sat at the curb across the road with its engine running.

Nobody parked a car on this street.

The dome light flicked on as the driver checked his phone.

I knew his face.

He had driven Luca for ten years.

He had driven me home from the hospital the night I broke my wrist.

He looked up at my window, and he didn't look away.

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