After My Heart Died, The Don Begged Crying at My Feet novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Hall

Nolan Hall was a brick building on Pier 28 with a faded harp painted over the door.

I had last been inside it at my father's wake.

Fitz unlocked it at nine on Monday morning, and the lights came on one row at a time.

Long tables filled the floor. At the far end stood a plain oak chair on a low wooden platform.

My father's chair.

I had sat on its arm when I was six, eating a sandwich while he told twelve grown men they were fools.

Behind it, a framed paper the size of a door hung on the brick wall.

It was covered with signatures.

The captains were already there, twenty or so of them, standing along the walls in their good coats.

Bruno Pace stood among them with his hands folded.

Dominic came in last, and he stopped just inside the doorway and came no farther.

Fitz walked up the length of the hall and took an envelope from inside the chair's cushion.

My name was on the front in my father's slanted hand.

"He wrote it the month he got sick," Fitz said. "He made me promise to give it to you if you ever asked me what the Coast was."

"I never asked."

"No. I'd have thought that was a mercy, if you'd had a husband who told you."

He put it in my hands.

I read it standing in the middle of the floor, with twenty men not looking at me.

My father had written:

"Anneliese. If Fitz is giving you this, I'm dead and something has gone wrong. The docks are yours by blood, and every man in this hall swore it on the paper behind my chair. The seat is the Nolan seat, and it goes to my child.

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