I Was the Mafia's Maid, Now I'm Their Regret novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Out the Gate

A guard lets her out, her card is declined, a classmate gives her the bracelet, and at two in the morning Valerio is outside with orders to bring her home.

I packed in six minutes.

Everything I owned fit in one duffel bag: my laptop, my textbooks, three sweaters and a jar of my grandmother's pepper flakes.

The housekeeper's room off the kitchen had been mine since Bianca took my bedroom.

I left the bed made.

Nobody came to stop me, and nobody came to say goodbye.

I carried the duffel through the kitchen and out the side door, down the gravel path to the wall.

The guard on the night shift stood up from his stool when he saw me.

I knew his schedule better than he did.

I had moved his Thursdays last spring so he could watch his daughter's recital, and he had never said a word about it.

"Miss Livia," he said. "Your father hasn't told me to stop you."

"Then don't."

He looked at the house, where every window on the first floor was lit.

Then he opened the little door in the gate and held it for me.

"Happy birthday," he said.

He was the first person all day to say it.

I walked two miles to the bus stop on the county road with my bag banging against my hip.

My phone buzzed the whole way.

The family chat first, where my message from dinner finally showed one blue check.

Under it, my brother had typed: who's doing laundry tomorrow.

Then a text from my mother.

Don't be dramatic. Bianca's dress needs steaming for Saturday.

I read it standing under the streetlight.

She had not written my name.

She had not asked where I was going or whether I had eaten.

I put the phone away and waited for the 9:40.

On the bus I reached for my wallet to pay and found forty dollars in cash and my bank card.

The account was the Family's, opened by my father when I was sixteen.

I tapped the card on the reader anyway.

The driver looked at the screen and shook his head. "It says closed."

"It can't be closed. I deposited a check Friday."

"Ma'am, I'm just telling you what it says."

I paid the fare in quarters from my pocket and sat in the back.

My tuition came out of that account.

So did my phone bill and my textbooks.

An hour ago I had walked out of a house with my chin up.

Now I counted the bills in my hand and did the math.

I had forty dollars and a duffel bag.

It was a little after ten when I rang the buzzer of the apartment where my study partner lived.

She opened the door in pajama pants with a pencil behind her ear and looked at the bag.

"Okay," she said. "What happened?"

"I need a couch for a night. Maybe two."

"You can have the couch for a month."

She pulled me in and shut the door, and the apartment smelled like toast and printer ink.

"Wait, wait, don't sit yet." She ran to her bedroom and came back holding a small white box with a ribbon on it.

"I was going to bring this to class tomorrow."

Inside was a silver watch, the plain one with the little green face.

I had mentioned it once, weeks ago, at a library table, while she was reading me her regression results.

I had not even told her it was my birthday.

"You said you liked it," she said. "I saw it in the window on Elm and thought of you. You fixed my entire model, Livia. It's the least I could do."

My throat closed up.

For a year I had done everything in that house, and nobody there had ever asked me what I liked.

A girl I only knew from a statistics class had remembered a single sentence.

"Thank you," I said, and my voice came out wrong.

She hugged me and did not ask a thing.

I put the watch on.

It fit.

She made up the couch and gave me a pillow and the last cupcake from her fridge.

I ate it in four bites, because I had not eaten since breakfast.

Around two in the morning I lay awake, listening to the radiator.

My phone lit up on the floor.

It was a text from a number with no name.

Come to the window.

I crossed the dark room and looked down at the street.

A black SUV sat at the curb with its lights off.

A tall man leaned against the passenger door with his hands in his coat pockets.

He looked up at the right window without having to search for it.

Valerio Carraro lifted one hand.

Then my phone lit again.

Your father sent me to bring you back.

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