I Vanished with the Don's True Heir novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Her Terms

The bell over the door rang behind her.

The white car went down the hill too fast.

The tea sat in front of her empty stool, still steaming.

"Well," said the tall lobsterman at last. "She didn't like your tea."

"No," I said. "She didn't."

I picked up her cup and poured it down the sink.

Then I turned around.

Livio was watching my face.

"What did she say to you?"

I told him.

He listened without a word, and his jaw worked at the part about April.

He took his phone out of the bait coat, the cheap one he'd bought at the gas station, and walked out into the lot with it.

He stood by the burned patch of gravel with his back to the diner.

When he came back in, he sat down on his stool and put the phone face down on the counter.

"My driver," he said. "He was outside the dining room on Sunday."

"And?"

"Achille stood up after dessert and said the family can't wait forever. That I'd abandoned the chair for a runaway. That I'd lost my mind up here." He said it flat, like a weather report. "Then they voted. Eleven capos. Nine hands."

"Who were the two?"

"Two old men."

Orsola came in from the office.

She'd heard. I could tell by the way she put her glasses on the cord.

"So," she said. "You're nobody."

"I'm nobody."

"Good. It's restful."

"I'll go back," Livio said. "Alone. Tomorrow."

"And do what?" I said.

"Talk to the capos one at a time. Put the clinic papers in front of them. Get my chair back before the Commission sits."

"In a room," I said. "Quietly."

He looked at me.

"That's how it's done."

"That's how it was done to me," I said. "In a room, quietly. And I'm the one who found out in a hospital bed."

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