Oops, My Online Ex Is the Mafia Don novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: It's Fiction

By seven there were four news vans at the bottom of the hill.

By eight there were nine.

I watched them from the blue room window in my robe, with my phone buzzing itself off the sill.

Rosalba came in without knocking and sat on my bed.

"You're trending," she said. "Above a senator."

"Which senator?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters a little."

She showed me.

Half a million people had seen me on the church steps in a yellow dress.

The man holding my hand had his face turned away, like he knew exactly where the camera was.

He probably had.

My editor called at 8:14.

She never called before ten.

"Siobhan," she said. "I have legal on the other line, and they're not having a good morning."

"Neither am I."

"Is it true?"

I looked at the photo.

At my own face, laughing at something he'd said.

"Which part?"

"Any of it. Are you married to a man the newspapers call a crime boss?"

"I'm married to a man who can't cook."

She didn't laugh.

"There's a morals clause in your contract. Legal says we can't put a mob wife's mafia romance on a table at Target."

"It's fiction."

"Then say so. Post a denial today. Say the girl in the photo isn't you, and we never had this call."

"And if I don't?"

She was quiet for a second.

"Then they cancel the deal, and they ask for the ninety thousand back."

The ninety thousand that a man had torn into four pieces and dropped in his wastebasket.

I sat down on the floor.

"How long do I have?"

"Noon."

She hung up.

Rosalba was chewing her thumbnail.

"Say it's not you," she said. "Honestly. Nobody can prove anything. Lu's not even in the picture, not really."

"I'd have to lie to six hundred thousand people."

"You lie to them every chapter. It's called fiction."

"That's different."

"How?"

"They know I'm doing it."

I went downstairs.

Luciano was at the long table with his phone face-down and his coffee untouched.

He'd heard.

Of course he'd heard.

The whole house heard everything.

"Deny it," he said, before I could open my mouth. "It's easier. I'll handle the rest."

"You'd let me say you don't exist."

"I've been not existing for years. I'm good at it."

I looked at him in the gray morning light.

At the bandage making a ridge under his shirt.

At a man who had hidden his face from me for fourteen months, and from the whole city for longer.

"No," I said.

I went back up and put on my pale blue dress with the white collar.

I tied a black bow in my hair.

I sat at the little desk under the blue room window, with my laptop open to chapter fifteen, the real one, half written.

Rosalba took the photo.

Then I wrote the caption myself.

"Yes, it's me. I'm honeybee. I married a man I love, and it's nobody's business but ours. 'Kiss the Ring' is fiction. Chapter fifteen is coming Friday."

I read it twice.

I took out "a man I love."

I put it back.

Then I posted it at 11:52.

The first comment came in nine seconds.

rosiereads: "THIRD READER. STILL HERE."

Then a woman in Ohio.

Then a nurse in Glasgow.

Then four hundred more, faster than I could read them.

By one o'clock the young capo was standing in our kitchen with his phone held out.

The baker was behind him, sweating through his shirt.

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