My Don Married My Pregnant Sister So I Choose His Mafia Rival novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Angelina

I read the line until the pencil marks stopped being words.

Downstairs, the front door opened.

Assunta's church shoes came down the hall, then stopped.

"Marcella? Why is the husband's car not outside?"

I went down with the letter in my hand.

She took one look at my face and sat down at the kitchen table without taking off her hat.

I gave it to her.

She read it with her glasses on the end of her nose.

She read the first page twice and the pencil line once.

Then she took her glasses off and pressed her hand flat over her mouth.

"That's his writing," she said through her fingers. "In the car. He always wrote in the car."

"Ettore had it for two years."

"I know who had it. It says on the front." She put her glasses back on and looked at me over them. "And you walked out on him."

"Nonna."

"I didn't say you were wrong." She folded the letter along its old creases, very carefully. "Your grandfather lied to me once, to spare me. I didn't speak to him for a month. Then I did."

She handed it back.

"Go and ask your sister," she said. "Then go home."

The Varrone house in Dyker Heights had white columns and a lawn nobody walked on.

At Christmas, the whole street came to look at its lights.

On the Monday morning of the Assumption, it just looked like money with the blinds down.

The Varrone housekeeper opened the door.

She was gray and thin and very frightened of whoever was behind her.

"Let the boat girl in," Ornella said from the hall. "She should see what a Cardone daughter is good for."

She was in black silk at ten in the morning.

The pearls were gone.

The widows' audit had gone through the fund the Monday after the birthday, line by line, and found it empty.

The parish ladies had stopped coming to her coffees.

It showed in her mouth.

She led me through to a dining room with a table for twenty.

My sister was on her knees at the far end of it.

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