The Don's Dying Wish novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: Measured

I didn't close my hand.

Closing it would have told him it mattered.

"Late night," Fabrizio said.

"The Don wanted to meet his daughter-in-law properly."

"With the door shut."

"He's dying," I said. "He doesn't have time to keep it open."

He pushed off the wall.

He was big up close, broad through the chest, with a cologne that arrived a second before he did.

He took two steps and I was against the doorframe.

"What's that?"

"His chain."

"I can see it's his chain." He held out his palm. "I'm asking what it opens."

The clock ticked over our heads.

Behind the door, the Don was breathing slow and loud.

Down the hall, the night nurse's radio was playing something soft.

Nobody was coming.

I looked him over, top to bottom, the way my father taught me to look at a man on a table.

"Six-one," I said. "Maybe six-two in shoes. Two-forty, two-fifty."

He frowned.

"Shoulders like that, you'd need the oversize casket. Twenty-eight inches across." I tilted my head. "We keep one in the back. People are always surprised how fast it goes."

His hand was still out.

"Brass handles would suit you," I said. "Something loud. Gold, maybe, to match the watch."

For a second nothing happened.

Then he dropped his hand and laughed, a little too loud.

"You're a sick girl, you know that?"

"I'm a funeral director. It's a professional opinion."

He leaned in until his breath moved my hair.

"Everything in this house is my mother's," he said quietly. "The furniture. The old man. The vegetable. You."

"I'm not a chair, Fabrizio."

"You're a rental." He tapped the key in my fingers with one fingernail. "And rentals get returned."

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