I Vanished with the Don's True Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: One Night Only

Orsola takes her in for a single night while the TV reports the Don's wife missing, then looks at Caterina's belly and asks if they put it in the honey.

She didn't lower the gun.

She took the card out of my hand with two fingers.

She looked at the lighthouse.

She opened it and read her own handwriting.

Her mouth went thin.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Out of his father's safe. There are twenty-seven more. Nobody ever opened them."

"And who are you?"

"Caterina. His wife."

The wind slammed a loose gutter somewhere along the building.

She looked at my belly again.

"Whose is that?"

"His," I said. "Not that he believes it."

For a long moment she just stood in the gap of the door, breathing through her nose.

Then she stepped back.

"One night," she said. "One. You're gone in the morning."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Wipe your feet."

The office was small and hot. A space heater ticked under the desk.

There was a rack of brochures for whale watching and a bell nobody would ever ring.

She leaned the shotgun against the wall behind the desk.

"You walked up that hill like that?"

"A man drove me from Bangor."

"Which man?"

"He didn't tell me his name. He told me about his ex-wife."

"Oh, him." She almost smiled. "She left him for a lobsterman with a bigger boat. Everybody on this coast has heard it."

She looked at my sweatpants.

PHILADELPHIA, all down the leg.

"Subtle," she said.

"They were nine dollars."

"You overpaid."

She pushed through a swinging door behind the desk, and I followed her into a kitchen.

It was a real diner kitchen, with a flat-top grill and a six-burner range and a long steel pass.

Everything was clean, and everything was cold.

Chairs sat upside down on the tables out front.

Only one burner worked tonight.

There was a pot on it.

She ladled soup into a bowl and put it in front of me with a spoon and half a sleeve of saltines.

White beans. Escarole. A rind of parmesan, cooked down soft.

I took one spoonful and had to put the spoon down.

"Something wrong with it?"

"My father made this," I said. "Every Friday. Above the bakery."

"Every Italian on Ninth Street made this."

"How do you know he was on Ninth Street?"

She didn't answer that.

She sat across from me and folded her arms and watched me eat the whole bowl.

Then she filled it again without asking.

"Eat. You're the color of a sheet."

"I'm fine."

"You came eleven hours in your pajamas to find a dead woman. You're not fine."

I ate the second bowl.

When I carried it to the sink she took it out of my hands.

"Guests don't wash."

"I'm not a guest. You said one night."

"One night is a guest."

I went back out to the office to get out of her way.

That was when I saw the photograph.

It hung on the wall behind the desk, in a cheap gold frame, a little faded.

A boy of about six, in a white shirt and short pants, on the front steps of a stone house.

He was scowling at the camera.

I'd seen that scowl across a pillow every morning for two years.

"He hated that shirt," she said behind me.

I hadn't heard her come back.

"It scratched. He cried the whole morning, and then he wouldn't take it off for a week."

"He still does that," I said. "With everything."

She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.

Then she reached past me and turned up the little TV on the shelf.

The late news out of Portland.

I wasn't thinking about the news. I was thinking about how to ask her the one question I'd ridden eleven hours to ask.

Then the anchor said, "Philadelphia."

I turned around.

There was a photograph of me on the screen.

My wedding photo. White dress, bare shoulders, Livio's arm cropped out at the elbow.

"The wife of reputed Philadelphia mob boss Livio Falcone is missing tonight," the anchor said. "Caterina Falcone, twenty-seven, left a city hospital early this morning without being discharged. A family spokesman says she may be confused and in need of medical care."

A family spokesman.

They cut to a clip of the gates at Chestnut Hill.

Then a man in a camel overcoat, outside the gates, with his hands folded.

Achille.

"We just want her home safe," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle like it hurt him. "Whatever she's done. She's family."

Whatever she's done.

I sat down hard on the stool behind the desk.

Orsola Falcone turned off the TV.

She didn't look at the dark screen.

She looked at the man's face still in her head.

"That's my sister-in-law's boy," she said quietly. "He got old."

"Achille."

"Achille."

She said it like a word she'd spat out once and found on the floor again.

Then her eyes came down to my stomach.

My hand was spread over it without my knowing. I'd been holding her like that since the hospital.

Orsola watched my hand for a long time.

"Tell me something," she said.

Her voice was very calm.

"Did they put it in the honey?"

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend