Seven Weeks Pregnant, until I Found His Secret Chat novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Curb

Two cars wait outside; Casey chooses the exiled brother's truck. Adele calls sweetly to say Dario is coming to fix it.

I did not go back inside.

I stood on the front path with the suitcase handle in my fist and read the head of the family's message once more.

He had hardly spoken to me at his own table in six years.

Now he had ordered his son to stop me, and he had not bothered to write it in English.

A pair of headlights came on at the far end of our street.

A black SUV rolled slowly toward the house, and I knew the two cousins in it.

They had carried my grandmother's sideboard up our stairs at Christmas.

They had also, I now remembered, been parked on our block most Saturday evenings for a year.

I turned the other way.

A second vehicle sat at the opposite curb with its lights off, an old green pickup with mud on the doors.

A man leaned on the hood with his arms crossed.

He was tall, broad through the shoulders, and his black hair had gone gray over the ears.

A scar split his left eyebrow in two.

I had met him once, at my own wedding, when he shook my hand for a moment and left before the cake.

Renzo Brancato.

The eldest son.

The one nobody in that house was allowed to name.

The SUV was thirty yards away and picking up speed.

Renzo looked at me, and then he said something in Italian, slowly and clearly.

"Vieni. Adesso. Prima che arrivino."

Come. Now. Before they get here.

I understood every word.

I saw him see that I had understood.

His expression shifted, cold and dangerous.

I ran.

I ran with a suitcase over uneven pavers, seven weeks pregnant, thinking only of the car behind me.

He took the suitcase out of my hand and threw it in the bed of the truck.

I pulled the passenger door shut as the SUV braked behind us.

Renzo drove straight at the cousins' car, then swung left across a neighbor's lawn and out the other end of the street.

In the mirror I saw the SUV try to follow and stall at the curb.

"They'll lose us at the highway ramp," he said.

His voice was low and rough, and he said it in English.

"You came for me," I said.

"I came to tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"What you already found out." He glanced at the iPad in my bag. "I read the chat this afternoon. I've read it for a long time. I was going to knock on your door and say it to your face."

I felt the air in the truck go very thin.

"How long is a long time?"

He kept his eyes on the road.

"Fourteen months."

Fourteen months he had known about Gianna.

Fourteen months I had set a plate for his brother on Wednesday nights, and he had never sent me one line.

I turned my face to the window so he couldn't see it.

My phone rang.

The screen said "Dario."

I looked at it for three rings.

Then I answered and said, in Italian, "Pronto."

There was a long silence on the line, and I heard him breathe.

"Casey," he said, in English. "Amore. What is this? Where are you?"

"Dove non sei tu," I said.

Where you are not.

"Don't speak that to me. Casey, you've misunderstood a few messages. Those jokes are nothing. Come home and we'll talk it through."

"You sent her four thousand dollars at noon."

"It was for something else."

"Your sister laughed four times."

"Casey."

I hung up.

Renzo said nothing.

He did not look at me, and he did not smile, and I was grateful for both.

My phone buzzed again almost at once, and I braced for Dario.

It was a text from his mother.

"Cara, I heard you were upset. Don't drive anywhere tonight, you shouldn't be driving with the baby. Dario is on his way home right now. He is going to fix it."

A second text came under it.

"Thursday at ten is still on. The doctor is expecting you, and he will take very good care of the baby."

I had said nothing to her about a baby tonight.

Her son had told her, at seven this morning, in the chat.

I read the line again, very slowly, and my skin went cold.

Renzo glanced down at the phone in my hand.

"What did she write?"

I held it up and he read it at the next red light.

The truck did not move when the light turned green.

"Which doctor?" he said.

"The family doctor. She booked him for Thursday before I even asked."

"He hasn't delivered a baby since I was in my twenties," Renzo said. "He signs whatever my mother puts in front of him."

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