Never Cross the Mafia Don's Hidden Lover novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: June Sixth
I held the jar up to Nonna's kitchen light.
The bullet rolled a little and settled.
"Where did you get this?"
"I asked the prosecutor for it, the day she gave you the ring." Elio leaned on the counter. "She said it belonged to the surgeon. I told her I knew the surgeon."
"You could have kept it."
"It came out of me. But you're the one who took it out." He nodded at the jar. "Your father had a jar. Nonna told me. It should have one again."
I didn't cry.
I'd promised Dina I wouldn't cry until after the makeup.
I went down the back stairs in my socks with the jar in both hands.
The clinic was dark and smelled like disinfectant and dog.
In my father's office, his stethoscope still hung on the hook behind the door.
The shelf beside it had been empty for two years.
I put the jar there.
BISCUIT, foreign body, 6/7, next to my father's stethoscope.
It looked like it had always been there.
On Saturday, June sixth, it was hot and bright on Murray Hill.
Nonna walked me down the aisle of our church herself, with her cane in one hand and my arm in the other.
She took it very slowly, on purpose, so everybody could look.
Dina stood up front in purple, already crying, with the harbor patrolman in the third row in a borrowed suit and no badge anywhere.
Tino stood beside Elio as his best man, in a new gray suit, with a cat hair on his lapel that nobody could make him take off.
Elio watched me come the whole way.
He didn't look anywhere else.
Not at the capos in their good suits in the back pew.
Not at Nonna.
When we got to the front, he took my hand off Nonna's arm.
The priest asked who gave this woman.
"I do," Nonna said. "And she's lent, not given. I want her back on Sundays."
The whole church laughed.
I said "I do" looking straight at him, in front of a church full of people who knew exactly who he was.
The reception was at the Feast committee hall over the church garage.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Never Cross the Mafia Don's Hidden Lover are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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