They Gave Her a Convoy, I Built My Own Legacy novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Soup Line

I stayed at the gate until the shadows of the iron bars reached my feet.

Then I walked to the end of the lawn and sat down on the pool house step.

I wasn't hiding.

I was doing the arithmetic I had done my whole life, and I wanted to finish it alone.

Newark wanted a girl who kept books.

The Don had asked for a girl who kept books.

My father had hidden me for exactly that reason.

Every man who had looked at me this week had looked at what I could add up.

Gianluca came across the grass and stopped at the bottom of the step.

He didn't sit.

"You've been out here two hours," he said.

"I'm counting."

"What's the total?"

"Everybody wants the books," I said. "And you're the one man who gets to say he wanted the girl first. How would I know?"

He took that without flinching.

It was the thing I had not said on the terrace, or in the pool house, or in the cot room.

It had been sitting in me since the ferry.

"Ask me how the Don found out about you," Gianluca said.

"How?"

"From me."

I looked up.

"Last April your father's ledgers came to my father's accountants," he said. "I was in the office, waiting to drive my father to a dinner. The accountant had one open on the desk and he was laughing."

"At what?"

"At a line in the margin of the Sunday count." He said it from memory. "Dad says the soup is the best thing in this building and the only honest one."

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