From the Don's Son's Plus-Size Girl to His Brother's Claim novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Every Night

Killian admits he answered every message for a year; by morning Cristina's video of the helipad is everywhere, and Tiziano walks into the deli to say the rent triples unless Meghan apologizes on her knees.

I didn't get in.

I stood in front of the open doors with my phone in one hand and my purse strap twisted around the other.

Killian put his arm out and held the door.

"You can take the next one," he said. "I'll wait."

"No." My voice came out wrong. "No, you're going to explain it on the way down."

I stepped in.

He let the doors close.

Forty floors. I watched the number above the door start to drop.

He didn't come any closer.

He stood against the back wall with his hands in his coat pockets, and he was so big the elevator looked like a closet.

"Start," I said.

"Last October. His birthday. Your mom catered it."

"I know. I was there. I was the one carrying trays."

"Cristina bet him fifty dollars you'd text if he gave you his number. He wrote it on a napkin." He kept his eyes on mine. "It wasn't his number. It was a spare phone from the warehouse drawer."

Thirty-four.

"The next morning he threw it at me across the kitchen. He said the fat one from the deli was going to text. He said have fun."

I made myself keep looking at him.

"Did you?"

"No."

"Did they read them?"

He didn't lie. I watched him think about lying and not do it.

"The first three. At a party. Out loud."

Twenty-nine.

The first three.

The first one was just hi, it's Meghan, from the deli, you probably don't remember me.

The second was me apologizing for the first.

The third one I wrote at two in the morning, after I'd closed, sitting on an upside-down bucket in the walk-in.

"They laughed," I said.

"Yes."

"Did you laugh?"

"No."

"How do I know that?"

"You don't." He shrugged one shoulder. "I took the phone off the counter while they were still laughing, and I put it in my pocket, and I never gave it back."

"And then you answered me."

"You'd written that you cry in the walk-in so the customers can't hear. I didn't want you sitting in there thinking nobody read it."

Nineteen.

My eyes were hot. I hated it.

"So it was pity."

"The first night."

"And the next three hundred and sixty-four?"

He looked at the number over the door for the first time.

"It wasn't pity," he said.

Fourteen.

I stared at him.

I'd seen Killian Caravello maybe twenty times in my life.

At Christmas parties, at the Don's Thursday lunches when he drove his father, at funerals.

He never ate the food.

He stood by the door with his arms crossed, and people talked about him in low voices.

The kid the Don brought home.

Not blood.

"Prove it," I said. "Tell me something. Something you'd only know if it was you."

He didn't even have to think.

"Your dad's apron is still on the hook by the slicer. Your mom washes it every month even though nobody wears it. You told me in March you touched it every morning for luck before you opened."

The doors opened on the lobby.

A couple in evening clothes waited outside.

They looked at Killian and stepped back.

I walked out past them.

He followed me as far as the revolving door, and then he stopped.

"Meghan."

I turned around.

"I told you not to lose it," he said. "I told you every week."

He had.

Don't lose a pound for me. Or for anyone.

I'd thought it was the sweetest thing a man had ever said to me.

I'd thought it was Tiziano.

"You told me you were him," I said.

"I never said a name."

"You let me say it. Every night."

He took that. He didn't argue.

"Yes," he said.

I went out through the door into the cold.

On the sidewalk, I opened my contacts and pressed on Tiziano.

Edit.

I deleted the name and typed a new one.

Liar.

Then I got in a cab and gave the driver my mother's address, and I didn't cry until Halsted Street.

The next morning, I opened the deli at six like always.

By seven, my phone had buzzed itself off the counter twice.

My cousin's wife sent it first.

Then three girls from high school.

Then a number I didn't know, then another, then forty more.

I opened Cristina's page with flour on my fingers.

She'd cut the video tight.

It started with an old picture of me from last year's Feast of Saint Joseph, at the deli's table in the street.

I was in my father's flannel shirt, laughing, with a plate of zeppole.

Then the roof.

Me in the red dress, saying, You asked me to come.

Tiziano laughing against the helicopter.

The slap.

The caption was in pink letters.

Deli girl lost 100 lbs because she thought a Caravello would marry her.

Two million views.

My mother came down the stairs in her robe and read it over my shoulder.

"Oh, hon," she said.

That was all.

She went and got her bread knife and started on the rye.

At nine the Saturday line was out the door, half of them regulars and half of them holding their phones up at me.

At nine fifteen, the line split.

Tiziano Caravello walked down the middle of it in sunglasses, with two men behind him.

He had a little red mark on his left cheek, and he was smiling.

He didn't look at me.

He leaned on the glass right in front of my mother.

"Mrs. Fennelly. My father owns this building, and I collect his rents."

My mother kept slicing.

"Your rent goes to seven thousand two hundred on Monday."

The knife stopped.

The whole line went quiet.

"Unless," Tiziano said, and finally looked at me, "your daughter comes to my engagement party next Saturday, and apologizes for hitting me. On her knees. In front of everybody."

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