My Mafia Husband Chose My Sister, So I Chose My Lost Love novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: On the Water

We drove home overnight and came down the lane at nine on Saturday morning.

The yard gate was open.

Somebody had tied a bunch of white balloons to it. Half of them had already popped in the wind.

There was a hand-lettered bedsheet hanging off the front of the shop.

GUILTY. WELCOME HOME.

The boy from the bucket line had spelled welcome with two L's, and somebody had crossed one out.

The dog hit me at the gate so hard I sat down in the gravel.

Gia came out of the bar across the harbor road in a man's raincoat over her nightgown, holding her stomach with both hands.

She'd been living in the room over the bar since the wedding.

The woman who ran it said a girl that pregnant shouldn't climb loft stairs, and that was that.

"I watched it on the television," Gia said. "The whole bar did. When he said guilty the first time, the co-op president bought a round."

"At nine in the morning?"

"Yesterday. At five forty." She put her arms around me, sideways, because her stomach wouldn't let her do it any other way. "They're still a little drunk."

The old man came out of the shop in his wool cap.

He looked at Sandro. He looked at me.

"Well," he said. "Keel's not going to plane itself."

That was the whole welcome.

Sandro went straight in and picked up the drawknife.

The new boat stood on her blocks where the sloop had been, ribs up, planked halfway along one side.

He still wouldn't tell me who she was for.

At five he came and found me at the hatch-cover table, doing the April invoices.

He'd showered. He'd trimmed his beard. He was wearing a clean flannel shirt, buttoned all the way up, which he never did.

"You look like a man going to court again," I said.

"Get your coat."

His old white lobster boat was waiting at the end of the float with the stove already lit.

The dog tried to come. The old man held her collar.

"Not tonight, girl," he said. "Tonight you're mine."

Sandro took us out past the co-op, past the moorings, past the last of the islands.

He brought us into a little cove with pink granite on three sides and spruce down to the water.

He dropped the anchor.

The engine went quiet.

The water was so still that the boat's green stripe showed upside down in it.

The sun was going down behind the spruce, and everything was gold.

He came out of the wheelhouse and stood in front of me on the deck.

He didn't kneel. The deck was wet.

He just stood there with his hands open.

"I had a speech," he said.

"Let's hear it."

"I forgot it." He laughed at himself. "I had it all the way down Route 1. It was good. There was a part about the steam box."

"Sandro."

"Okay." He breathed in.

"Ten years ago, I asked you in my father's Buick on Federal Hill. You said yes. I had forty dollars and a ring from a pawn shop."

"And then I let a bunch of men in suits take it away from both of us."

The water lapped against the hull.

"I'm not asking you to finish what we started at nineteen," he said. "That boy's gone. You pulled what was left of him out of the bay."

He held out his hand, palm up.

"I'm asking the woman who saved my yard and bent my plank and walked out of that church. Annalisa Sorrentino. Will you marry me?"

I took the ring out of my coat pocket.

I put it in his palm.

"You said I'd tell you what you did wrong in the asking."

"I knew it."

"You didn't kneel," I said. "You forgot your speech. And you said my name like you were reading it off a subpoena."

"Is that a no?"

"It's a list." I held out my left hand. "Yes, Sandro. Yes."

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