My Don's Friends Spoke Italian to Shut Me Out novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Vote

On Wednesday morning I put on a navy dress and flat shoes and stood behind my husband's chair.

The back room at Gallo's held a long table and twelve men.

I knew most of them now by their rings.

Tommaso sat at the far end under a painting of the Bay of Naples, with a paper folder in front of him and Bianca at his elbow taking notes.

Gaspare sat halfway down, gray and stubborn, with his sling inside his jacket.

His eyes met mine for a second.

Then Tommaso rose, and the room went silent.

"Signori," he began, and the Italian rolled out of him like warm oil.

I kept my hand light on Cesare's shoulder.

I listened the way I'd learned to listen to a monitor in an ER, for the pattern under the noise.

Tommaso spoke about the attack.

About grief, and fear, and the port.

I caught *attacco*, and *paura*, and *il porto*, and every few sentences my own name, which he said very softly.

Then he opened the folder.

"I have here a statement," he said in English, for the Don's benefit. "A very small matter. The captains have asked that, for the safety of the family, the Don allow the council to manage the port and the docks for sixty days, until the danger passes."

He looked at Cesare with gentle eyes.

"Sixty days, Cesare. A rest. After that, everything returns to you."

He began to read the paper aloud in Italian.

The captains murmured.

I could not follow it.

But I had spent one morning with the cook's order pad, and I had spent one night with Agnese's primer under a lamp, and in the middle of the second page, there was a word I knew.

*Sempre.*

Agnese had underlined it twice in the primer, in pencil, and written the English beside it.

ALWAYS. FOREVER.

Tommaso read it again two lines later.

*Per sempre.*

My fingers dug into Cesare's shoulder.

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