He Spoke Her Language, So I Said Goodbye novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Sixty Thousand

Luca shows Willa the lease proving Gianna lives above Dante's restaurant on Willa's money; Dante begs at Bridget's door and threatens her, and Gianna posts a video calling Willa unwell.

By four that afternoon I was on my sister's couch in a Boston University T-shirt with my phone face down on the cushion.

It had buzzed forty-one times since noon.

Bridget set a plate of scrambled eggs on my knees and sat down on the coffee table to watch me not eat them.

"I changed out of the green dress in the hotel stairwell," she said. "I'm never wearing taffeta again."

"Thank you for sitting in the front."

"Thank you for letting me. I've wanted to throw something at him for two years."

"You never said."

"You never asked me to." She picked up my fork and put it in my hand. "Eat."

I ate two bites.

The buzzer on the wall went off.

Bridget looked at the screen, then at me.

"It's not him," she said. "It's the brother."

Luca stood in her kitchen doorway a minute later with his tie in his pocket and a folded sheet of paper in his hand.

He didn't sit down when she offered a chair.

"I'll say it fast," he said. "Dante's restaurant has a lease on the building. I signed as guarantor three years ago, because my mother asked me to."

"All right," I said.

"There's a second lease in the same building, on the apartment upstairs. I saw it when the landlord sent me the renewal."

He unfolded the paper and laid it on the arm of the couch.

It was a photocopy with a long line of numbers across the top.

Tenant: Gianna Esposito.

Monthly rent: paid by Dante's Table LLC.

"Your money bought the restaurant's equipment and its first six months," Luca said. "Her rent comes out of the same account."

"How long?"

"Fourteen months. It started the week the restaurant opened."

Fourteen months was how long I had worn his ring.

I looked at the paper for a while.

"Why are you showing me this?" I asked. "He's your brother."

"He is." Luca's jaw moved once. "That's why it should have come from me three hours ago."

Bridget crossed her arms.

"Three hours ago it did," she said. "You walked her out of the room."

"That's not the same as telling her."

I didn't know what he meant by that, and I was too tired to ask.

He left the paper on the couch and went out without another word.

Bridget watched the door close.

"Huh," she said.

"Don't start."

"I'm not starting anything. I'm saying a man put a lease on a couch and left without his coffee."

The buzzer went again at six.

This time Bridget looked at the screen for a long moment before she said anything.

"Flowers," she said. "Forty of them. Red."

I didn't have to ask whose.

I went to the door and left the chain on.

Dante stood in the hall in his wedding trousers and a wrinkled white shirt, holding a bouquet that was too big for him.

His eyes were red.

"Willa. Please. Five minutes."

"You have until this chain stops being a chain."

He tried a smile, and it didn't work.

"You embarrassed my mother in front of everyone she knows. You embarrassed me. But I forgive you, because I know you were hurt."

"You forgive me."

"We can fix this. Come home. We'll tell everyone Gianna and I were drunk and joking, and I'll make it up to you."

"You were in a parking garage at ten in the morning."

"Willa."

"And Gianna lives in the apartment above your restaurant."

His face changed, very fast, and then he fixed it.

"Who told you that?"

"Where's the sixty thousand, Dante?"

"It's in the restaurant. It's our start. Everything I own is yours too, you know that. Come on, amore, you gave it to me."

"I gave it to you with a bow on it," I said. "I heard you tell her."

He looked down at the flowers.

For a moment he looked exactly like the man who had cried at my mother's grave.

I didn't open the chain.

"I want it back," I said. "All of it. Before the end of the month."

"You can't be serious."

"I have it saved in three places, Dante. One of them is my sister's."

His mouth went flat.

"Then I'll make sure everyone knows what kind of person records her own wedding," he said. "Think about that."

He put the flowers on the mat and walked down the stairs.

Bridget came up beside me and looked at the flowers.

"I'll put those in the trash," she said, "after I take a picture for my group chat."

My phone buzzed against the arm of the couch.

I looked at it for the first time since noon.

It was a video from Gianna's account, posted forty minutes ago, with sixteen hundred likes.

It showed me at the microphone in my hoodie, my hair coming loose, my mouth open.

The caption read: Please pray for my friend. She's not well.

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