Chapter 13: The Well

A hundred heads turned from Carmine to me.

I felt it on my skin, the way I'd felt it at Sunday dinner six years ago.

The same aunts. The same cousins. The same men who'd looked at the ceiling.

"While you were my wife," Carmine said again, slower, so the back of the room could hear. "Under my father's roof. With my brother."

An aunt crossed herself.

Somebody near the stairs said, "Madonna."

I opened my mouth.

Gianni got there first.

He didn't go to the microphone.

He didn't need one.

He just stepped out from beside Pop's wheelchair, into the middle of the red room, and the people around him moved back without being asked.

"I was eleven months out of a cell," he said. "I sat at the far end of that table every Sunday. I never touched her."

"You'd say anything."

"Ask the aunts where I sat."

Nobody had to ask.

"The end," said the aunt who'd read the sonogram. "By the kids. He never said ten words."

"He said one," another aunt said. "The night she left. He said enough."

Carmine laughed into the microphone.

It boomed off the walls and came back thin.

"So she found him later. In a parking lot. Who cares when."

"I care when," I said.

I walked to the middle of the room and stood beside Gianni.

Not touching him. Just beside him.

"The label on the vial said CORSARO, CARMINE," I said to the room. "The night nurse read it aloud and said it was older than my marriage."

The room didn't understand yet.

Pop did.

His eyes opened.

"Gianni banked at Haverford," I said. "His mother sent him. A month before our wedding. A week before he went to prison for something he didn't do."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Mafia Heir's Revenge Baby from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.