My Don Husband Wants Two Wives novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms

Aldo takes his daughter home in the dawn light, and Livia sets three terms for attending the engagement dinner.

"Stay up here," Rocco said.

"It's my shop," I said.

"It's my name on the lease of every building on this street, Livia."

"Then you shouldn't have let me keep a flat above it."

He almost smiled and then didn't.

Bianca had pulled her shoes on and stood behind us with her suitcase held in both hands.

"I'll go down," she said. "If I go to him, nobody has to say you took me."

"No," Rocco said.

"Yes," I said, at the same moment.

We looked at each other.

In the end the three of us went down together, with Rocco in front.

The cold on Harlem Avenue smelled of exhaust.

The four men straightened up from the cars.

Rocco stopped on the pavement with his hands loose at his sides, and that was enough to make them take their own hands out of their pockets.

The back door of the second car opened.

Aldo Corsetti got out in his camel coat, with the gold watch chain across his vest, and he looked at his daughter first.

"Bianca," he said. "You gave me a fright."

"I'm sorry, Papa."

"Come here."

She went.

He put his hand on the back of her head and kissed her hair, and I would have believed it was love if I hadn't heard her breathing.

Then he looked at Rocco.

"I assumed the worst, Don Brandolini," Aldo said. "My men did too. I apologize for it."

"Tell your men to go home," Rocco said.

"Of course."

Aldo made a small motion with two fingers and the four men got into the cars.

Then he turned to me.

"Serra," he said. "I owe you thanks."

"I didn't do anything. She knocked."

"She knocked at the door of a woman who didn't throw her out." His eyes were kind and tired. "Not everyone would."

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.

Rocco shifted his weight a half step so that he stood between us.

Aldo noticed, and he smiled.

"Three weeks," he said. "I look forward to it."

He put Bianca into the car himself.

She looked back through the rear window once, at me, and her mouth made a word I could not read.

Then the cars were gone and the street was empty.

It was just after four.

Upstairs I put the kettle on because I couldn't think of anything else to do with my hands.

Rocco sat on the fitting stool, which was too small for him, and watched me.

"Say what you want to say," I told him.

"I want you to come back."

"Not what you want. What you're offering."

He thought about it.

Then he put both forearms on his knees and looked at the floor between his shoes.

"The rite goes ahead," he said. "I can't stop it. If I do, the docks go to the Corsetti family and half my men with them. You stay my wife. You stay in the house. Nothing changes."

"Stop saying that."

"It's true."

"Everything changes, Rocco. You've just told me a woman will be sleeping under my roof."

"She won't be sleeping under your roof. I'll give her a house of her own."

"You'll give her a house." I put the cup down so I didn't throw it. "In March you said the council decides. I'll tell you what I decide. I'll come to the engagement dinner on Friday. I'll sit where a wife sits. And I'll go home to my own flat afterward."

"Livia."

"Three terms," I said.

He waited.

"One. At every table, I sit at your right. Not below her, not beside her, at your right. Two. You don't touch her. Not her hand, not her coat. Three. If I leave a room, nobody follows me."

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, "Agreed."

It was too fast.

I noticed it and I didn't like it, and I also noticed that he was studying my face while he said it.

The shop bell rang downstairs.

Light was coming gray through the windows now.

I went down and found a florist's boy in the doorway holding a long white box tied with green ribbon.

"Serra Alterations?" he said. "For Miss Serra."

I signed for it.

It was the same box as every year, the same ribbon, the same hothouse white roses, three dozen of them, packed in wet tissue.

Inside lay the same card.

A plain cream card with one letter on it in black ink.

C.

"Every year, my birthday week," I said, and I laughed a little because it was easier than the other thing. "Someone who doesn't want to be thanked. I thought it was a customer with good manners."

I turned around with the box in my arms.

Rocco stood on the bottom stair.

He was looking at the card, and for the first time all night I could not read his face at all.

"How many years?" he said.

"Five. Since the wedding."

"Since the wedding."

He didn't say anything else.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. I'll call you about Friday."

He went out.

The bell rang behind him, and I stood in my empty shop at six in the morning with three dozen roses and an agreement I had just won much too easily.

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