My Husband and My Best Friend Betrayed Me on Our Wedding Day. Twice. novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Rosa

Luca ran two red lights and took the turn onto Atwells Avenue on two wheels.

I held the phone on my knee on speaker, and my mother's kitchen voice came out of it.

"I'm not signing that," Rosa said.

"You don't even know what it says," said Bianca.

"I know the name at the bottom. It's not mine."

Luca's knuckles went white on the wheel.

"What is she holding?" he said.

"A statement," I said. "I think she wants my mother to say you paid her."

The old Morandi bakery was a narrow brick building between a shuttered pharmacy and a pizza window.

My grandfather had baked bread there for forty years. My mother had kept the key after the family sold the lease, and she kept it in her purse with the rosary.

A light burned inside, low and yellow.

Luca stopped the car at the curb. I was out before it settled.

The front door was unlocked.

I pushed it open an inch and stopped.

My mother sat on a stool beside the big dough table with her handbag in her lap. Flour dusted the table in a long pale smear.

Bianca stood across from her with a sheet of paper in one hand and a pen in the other.

She had changed out of the cream dress. She wore jeans, and her face was blotched from crying.

I had not been seen yet. Luca put his hand flat against my back, and we both stayed in the dark of the doorway.

"It says Luca gave you forty thousand dollars," Bianca said. "That's all. That he wanted you to keep Valeria away from him."

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