My Mafia Husband Chose My Sister, So I Chose My Lost Love novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Lady of the House

Gia takes over the house while Annalisa plays docile and copies the investigator's file, then drives north at dawn.

By ten that morning my sister had a clipboard.

She stood in the front hall in my robe and a pair of my slippers, reading from it.

"The yellow flowers have to go. They make me sick now."

"They're tulips," I said. "Ma's favorite."

"They make me sick, Annalisa."

The housekeeper looked at me.

I nodded.

The tulips went out the back door in a black bag.

That was the plan I'd made at the top of the stairs, after Renato left.

Nod. Smile. Hand her everything she asks for.

Let them all watch a woman giving up.

Gia went room by room. I followed her.

She moved the dining chairs. She cancelled my standing order with the butcher on Atwells Avenue and asked for a place that delivered sushi.

"You can't eat sushi," I said. "You're pregnant."

She went pink. "I know that. It's for after."

In the library she pulled my mother's rosary off the shelf and held it up.

"Can I have this? For the baby's room?"

My throat closed.

"Take it."

Renato's consigliere came in at eleven.

He was a gray, quiet man who had been old when I married into this house.

He kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes everywhere.

He sat in the front parlor with a cup of coffee and didn't drink it.

He was there to watch me. Everybody knew it.

At noon Gia stopped outside the study door.

"This one," she said. "This is the nursery."

"That's where the books are."

"So move the books." She tapped the clipboard with her red nail. "Renato said I could pick any room. This one gets the morning sun."

"Of course," I said. "I'll pack it up this afternoon."

The consigliere set his cup down in the parlor.

I felt him listening.

"I'll need a few hours alone in there," I said. "Nine years of files. If I mix them up, Renato's accountant will cry."

Gia laughed. It was the first real sound she'd made all day.

"God, you're so boring," she said. "Fine. Take all day."

I went into the study and shut the door.

I didn't lock it. A locked door would bring the old man down the hall.

I opened the cardboard boxes the housekeeper had left me and made a great noise with them.

Then I sat down at the computer.

The investigator's folder was still there.

Forty quarters. One hundred and sixty photographs.

Sandro in a snowstorm, shoveling a dock.

Sandro in shirtsleeves, carrying lumber.

Sandro on a stool at a harbor bar, laughing at something a fisherman said.

Sandro on a Friday in March, sitting on the tailgate of a truck with a big black dog's head in his lap.

I had grieved him for ten years.

My husband had kept a scrapbook.

I slid a flash drive into the port and copied the whole folder.

Then I opened the last report.

It gave the name of the yard and the road it was on in Stonington, Maine.

It gave his Tuesday routine, because the man in Bangor only ever came on Tuesdays.

Today was Friday.

There was a knock.

I pulled the drive and closed my fist around it.

Gia leaned in without waiting.

She had taken off the robe. She was in a sweater now, and for a second she looked fourteen.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Ask."

She looked at the boxes, not at me.

"Did he really never want one with you? A baby?"

I thought about the little white bags.

"He had the doctor send me pills every month for ten years," I said. "He never asked me what I wanted."

Gia's mouth opened.

The consigliere's footsteps came down the hall.

She closed it again, and the door with it.

I packed the study until dark.

Every ledger the family knew about went into a labeled box.

The ones they didn't know about stayed where they had always been.

They were in the back of the wall safe, behind the old port deeds nobody had read since my father died.

At dinner Renato kissed Gia's hair and asked how her day was.

"Your wife was very helpful," she said.

"Was she?" He looked at me down the table. "Good."

I ate my pasta.

I said goodnight at nine.

At eleven the housekeeper knocked on my bedroom door with a stack of clean towels I hadn't asked for.

Under the towels there was a set of car keys on a plastic ring from a Cranston dealership.

"My Honda is the gray one by the kitchen door," she said quietly. "It's old. Nobody looks at it."

"Why?"

She looked at the bare spot on my hand where the ring used to be.

"Because I made up the blue suite," she said. "And I shouldn't have."

She left before I could thank her.

I didn't sleep that night either.

At four I put on jeans and a dark coat and left my phone on the pillow where Renato's people could find it.

At ten past four I walked out through the kitchen in my socks, carrying my boots.

The gray Honda started on the second try.

I didn't go through the front gate.

I took the service lane past the garages, onto Blackstone Boulevard, and then onto the highway, heading north in the dark.

The sky was just going pink when I crossed into New Hampshire.

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