He Denied Our Daughter, Now He Begs for Us novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Don't Make a Scene
Moira has her daughter alone while Giacomo claims he is at a Family meeting, then he walks in with roses for the woman in the next bed. He signs her son's birth form and leaves his daughter's blank. Moira steps out; the Family adviser writes her mother's name in his notebook, and her insurance is cancelled.
After twelve hours of labor, I called my husband and he said he was in Boston.
"She's here, Giacomo," I said. "She has your eyes."
He didn't speak for a few moments.
Then he said, "Good. I'm at a Family council meeting. I'll call you tonight."
He hung up before I could say her name.
I lay in the hospital bed with the phone on my chest and cried into the pillow.
The woman in the next bed was on her phone too.
Her voice was sweet and bright. "Honey, you bought three kinds of pacifiers? Of course I love them."
She hung up and smiled at me. "My husband is wonderful. He started shopping for the baby three months ago."
Her eyes went to my bedside table.
It held a plastic cup and my phone.
Her smile slipped, and she turned toward her son.
That night I held my daughter and texted Giacomo again.
I wrote: She looks so much like you. Please come see her.
He didn't answer.
At midnight I heard two men walking in the hall.
I knew those footsteps. They were Giacomo's bodyguards, who had driven me to every prenatal appointment he skipped.
The woman in the next bed sat up. "That's my husband," she said. "Finally."
The door opened.
Giacomo came in with the cold still on his black coat.
He carried white roses and a gift bag from a boutique.
"What took you so long?" she said, and held out her arms. "Rocco and I have been waiting all night."
Giacomo bent to kiss her.
Then he looked past her and saw me.
He stopped moving.
I looked back at him.
At the man who had told me that very afternoon that he was in Boston.
A laugh came out of me, and I was crying again.
"Giacomo," the woman said. "Do you know her?"
I held Daisy against my chest and waited.
Giacomo wouldn't look at the baby. "She's family," he said. "My cousin's widow. I look after her."
He glanced at my left hand.
"She still wears his ring."
It was his ring. I had worn it for six years.
The card in the roses had fallen on the blanket.
It said: For Gianna. You gave me a son. His name is Rocco Giacomo Ferraro.
They had already picked the name.
When I was pregnant, Giacomo had put his hand on my stomach and said that if it was a girl, we'd call her Daisy.
"It's an ordinary flower," he'd said, "but it comes back every spring. All I want is for her to be safe."
Now he was holding Gianna's son with one hand spread across the baby's back.
Daisy woke up and started to cry.
He heard her.
He didn't turn his head.
A nurse came in with two birth forms and went to Gianna first.
"Mr. Ferraro, just sign the father's line for Rocco."
Giacomo signed it without reading it.
A man I recognized stood in the doorway with a leather book under his arm.
He was the Family's adviser, and the book was the register where every Ferraro child was written down.
He opened it and wrote Rocco's name on a fresh page.
The nurse came to my bed and stopped.
"Mrs. Ferraro has put you down as the father too," she said to Giacomo. "I need you to confirm it, or I'll leave that line empty."
Nobody in the room said anything.
Gianna's face went white. "Her baby is yours?"
Giacomo looked at Daisy for the first time.
"Leave it empty for now," he said.
The adviser closed the register and said, "Then the child has no page."
He turned to me. "Mrs. Ferraro, for the record, what was your mother's name before she married?"
I thought it couldn't hurt. "Adele Corso."
He wrote it in a small black notebook and looked at Daisy's face a moment longer than he needed to.
Then he went back to the door.
Without a page in the register, my daughter had no protection from the Family.
Daisy cried harder, and the nurse touched her cheek and frowned. "Her sugar is low. Did you bring formula?"
I had nothing.
Giacomo had told me he would handle everything.
Gianna's suitcase stood open beside her bed, full of cans and bottles still in their wrappers.
Giacomo took out a can and started toward me.
Gianna caught his sleeve. "Rocco has a sensitive stomach. We can't run short."
Giacomo put the can back.
"The hospital has a supply, Moira," he said.
"She's your daughter," I said.
"I know." He said it quietly. "Don't make a scene."
I had signed my own consent forms. I had pushed alone. I had called him alone, after.
And he thought I was making a scene.
So I stepped out.
I handed the form back to the nurse. "Leave his line empty, and don't ever fill it in."
I looked at the adviser. "She doesn't go in his book."
Giacomo's mouth opened, but I was already asking the nurse for hospital formula.
I fed my daughter in the dark while he walked Gianna's roses to the window.
My phone buzzed.
It was a message from the billing office: my insurance had been cancelled that afternoon.
Then a second message, from Giacomo.
He was standing ten feet away with his phone in his hand.
Take the money my lawyer brings in the morning, it said. Say nothing to anyone and you can keep the apartment.
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