Chapter 17: What Nadia Kept

The church on Atwells Avenue was empty except for one woman in the last pew.

She wore a gray coat with the collar up, and she was holding her phone in both hands.

The doctor had packed Santo's shoulder on the dock, and he walked in beside me with his arm in a sling and a cold sweat on his face.

He told his men to wait outside.

Nadia got to her feet when she saw us.

Without the green dress and the lowered eyes she looked like what she was, a frightened woman of thirty-one who had slept in her clothes.

"You came," she said.

"You said you had something," said Santo.

"I do."

She looked at me, and I looked back.

"I'm not going to say sorry," Nadia said. "You wouldn't take it."

"No."

"But I'll tell you the whole of it. I have nowhere left to run."

We sat in the pew in front of her, and she told it to the altar.

She had met Ottavio at twenty-five, in the back room of a restaurant where she waited tables.

He was kind, and he was married to the family's business more than to any woman, and he said he was lonely.

For two years she was his, and then she was pregnant, and Ottavio was gentle about it.

"He said he couldn't be the father," she said. "He was too close to the Don. His enemies would use it."

"So he found a father for it," I said.

"The winter after your wedding. He told me Santo would be drunk and alone at the lake house on a particular night, and that I should be there."

"I remember that night," Santo said hoarsely. "I don't remember it."

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