Chapter 6: The Christening Gown

The invitation came to Rina's door on Saturday morning by courier, on cream card, in Agnese's handwriting.

Delfina's baby shower, two o'clock, the Garavani house in Oak Park.

Under it, in smaller letters, Agnese had written: Family should be there.

"Don't go," Rina said, pulling a croissant apart at the counter. "She wants to watch you smile at a stroller."

"I know what she wants."

"Then why go?"

"Because Delfina whispered 'I had no choice' into my ear, and I'd like to see her face when she can't."

Teo had said nothing useful that week.

He had asked his wife one question on Friday, in their kitchen, and she had cried for an hour.

"She said she wanted a baby so badly she'd have done anything," he told me over the phone. "She won't say his name or what she paid."

"What she paid?"

"Her word. She said, 'I paid, Teo, and I'd pay again.'"

I went to the shower in a navy dress that fit me, which was a small win.

The Garavani house had a wide lawn, a white tent on it, and forty women under the tent holding glasses of pink punch.

Nobody asked who I was. All of them knew.

I stood beside the gift table, with its pyramid of blue-and-yellow boxes, and let them look.

A woman I had known for five years turned her back to me in the middle of a sentence.

Another touched her pearls and murmured to her neighbor, "She has some nerve."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Mafia Husband Gave His Ex a Baby, So I Took Her Husband from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.