Chapter 10: The Don

"Come home, Emanuela," my father said again.

The tellers behind the glass had stopped moving.

A woman with a toddler on her hip stood frozen at the door.

Corrado's two guards had their hands inside their coats.

I held the leather folder against my chest and didn't answer.

"Your mother is crying herself sick," my father said.

"Fiorella hasn't eaten since the hall."

"This foolishness has gone on long enough."

"Whatever that man has told you, whatever he put in that box, it's the work of a liar."

"I haven't been told anything," I said.

"I read it."

His smile held, but it thinned.

"Ruggero Sabbadin was a drunk," he said.

"He died in a fire he started himself."

"I took in his child out of pity."

"Is that why you burned the house?"

The woman with the toddler backed through the door and ran.

My father didn't look at her.

"You were five," he said.

"You can't know what you're saying."

"He wrote me a letter before it happened," I said.

"He knew you'd call it an accident."

For a moment my father only sat there, big and silver and still, with the folded coat on his knee.

Then something went out of his face.

It wasn't shame.

It was the polite mask, slipping off.

"He was a fool," my father said quietly.

"He'd built the Quay up so high he thought it was his own country."

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