Reborn as the Mafia King's Wife novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Her Own Door

The apartment was three flights up and small enough to hear its own pipes.

I chose it because every key belonged to me.

For six days I used them.

On the second day I drove a woman Carlo had frightened to her mother's house in Joliet.

On the fourth I sat in a kitchen in Cicero and told a man's whole family what Carlo had made him carry.

Nobody called me Mrs. Vescari there.

They called me the sister who talked.

On the sixth night somebody knocked.

I knew the knock before I opened the door.

Gina stood on my landing in the dress from the hall.

It was soaked through.

She had no coat and no bag, and her lip was split.

"He left me at the bus station," she said.

"With what?"

"Nothing. He took my phone so I couldn't call you."

She laughed, and it came out wrong.

"Isn't that funny? He thought I'd call you."

I didn't move out of the doorway.

She looked past me at the little kitchen, the lamp, the one chair.

"You're my sister," she said. "Let me in."

"I was your sister on my birthday, too."

Her face did something I had waited two lives to see.

It cracked.

Then it closed again, smooth as the frosting on that cake.

"You think you won," she said.

"I think you're standing in the rain outside my door."

"He'll get tired of you. Men like that always do."

"Men like Carlo," I said.

Gina leaned in until I could smell the wet on her.

"Do you know where your husband has been every night this week?"

I said nothing.

"Across the street," she said. "In a black car. Watching your window."

She smiled with her split lip.

"You left him, and he followed you like a dog. You call that love? I call it a cage with a better door."

I reached into my pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill.

I put it in her hand and closed her fingers over it.

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