I Let My Sister Have the Man Who Broke My Heart novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Widow in Waiting

Luca meets Gemma at the Miami airport with her coat, she sets her terms in the car, and at the first Amadori dinner a cousin toasts her as the widow in waiting.

Luca was standing at the end of the arrivals hall in Miami, and he was holding a coat.

It was my coat, the heavy grey wool one I had left in the Brooklyn closet that morning.

I stopped walking.

"How did you get that?"

"My mother asked yours to send it with the driver," Luca said. "I wanted you warm."

He looked exactly like the boy I remembered, except taller.

Grey eyes, dark hair, a thin face with a straight nose.

He wore a pale shirt open at the collar and held the coat out to me in one hand.

Then he turned his head and coughed into a white handkerchief.

It was a long, hard cough, the kind that makes strangers look away.

I watched his shoulders and his hands.

The handkerchief came away clean.

When the cough ended, he looked at me, and the rest of the hall was not looking at him anymore.

"Sorry," he said. "It's the first thing people see."

"It's the second thing I see," I said. "The first is that you came yourself."

His mouth moved.

It was not quite a smile.

"You said you'd bring a coat," he said. "I thought I'd save you the trouble."

I took the coat and put it on.

It was warm from his arm.

He took my suitcase before I could stop him and handed it to a driver without any visible effort.

The back seat of the car was wide and cool.

The driver closed the privacy glass.

Luca sat beside me with the length of the seat between us.

"Your sister called my mother this morning," he said.

My stomach dropped.

"What did she say?"

"That you've been seeing Cesare Albano for a year. That you were ashamed, and that I deserved to know before the wedding."

"And what did your mother say?"

"That she has met you." He turned the handkerchief over in his hand. "She hung up on her."

I laughed before I could help it.

It came out too loud in the quiet car.

Luca looked at me, and for a moment there was nothing sick in his face at all.

"You laugh like you did when you were eight," he said.

"I remember you being eleven and bossy."

"I remember you biting me."

"You took my ice cream."

"You'd already dropped it."

The car turned onto a long road lined with palms.

"Luca, I should tell you something before we get to your house."

"Go ahead."

"I didn't pick you because I like you."

He nodded once.

"I picked you because my sister wanted the other file, and I wanted her not to have it." I kept my eyes on the water. "That's the truth. I'm sorry it's not nicer."

I had expected him to look hurt.

He looked interested.

"And do you want to stay married to me?"

"I want to do my job," I said. "I'm an accountant. I keep books. I'll keep yours, and I'll be good at it."

"Is that all?"

"For one year. After that we can talk."

"One year."

"I have terms."

"I'm listening."

"My hands on your books, all of them," I said. "Separate bedrooms. In front of your family I'll be your wife. Behind a closed door I'm not."

Luca was quiet for a second.

"Those are good terms," he said. "Can I add one?"

"What?"

"No lying to me. About anything."

I thought about the truck on Atlantic Avenue and the red light.

I thought about the life I had already lived and what I could never say.

"Agreed," I said. "You too."

"Agreed."

He held out his hand.

I took it.

His hand was warm and dry and a good deal stronger than a sick man's hand ought to be, and when I tried to let go, he did not let go at once.

His thumb moved once across my knuckles.

I felt it in my wrist, my elbow and the back of my neck.

Then he let go and pressed the handkerchief to his mouth again, and coughed.

I looked out the window and told myself the car was warm.

The house stood at the end of the palm road, white and low and enormous, with a gate and two men in suits.

A crowd stood on the front steps.

Every one of them looked at Luca, and then at me, with the same soft pity.

His mother stood in the middle of the group, a small woman in a lilac dress, and she opened her arms.

I went into them without thinking.

"Gemma," she said into my hair. "You came. You really came."

At dinner, the table seated twenty.

They put me beside Luca at the head, and the cousins arranged themselves down both sides, all in dark suits.

A man in his forties with a heavy gold ring leaned across the bread basket and smiled at me.

"So you're the one," he said. "We were all curious who'd marry Luca."

"I'm glad you're curious."

"Of course. A beautiful girl, a short engagement and a husband who might not make it to the second anniversary." He raised his glass. "To the widow in waiting."

Nobody laughed.

Nobody told him to stop, either.

Luca coughed into his handkerchief, and I felt his knee press once against mine under the table.

It was a signal.

I did not know what it meant.

I smiled at the cousin with the ring and lifted my glass.

"To the books," I said. "Since I'll be seeing every one of them."

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