He Denied Our Daughter, Now He Begs for Us novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Put Her Down

Moira calls the whole maternity floor to her door while Giacomo holds the daughter he won't name. He sets her down. At discharge her key no longer fits, and Santo Rinaldi steps out of a black car.

"Giacomo Ferraro!" I shouted down the corridor. "That's my daughter, and he's carrying her out of my room!"

Every nurse at the station looked up.

A woman in a robe stopped her IV pole in the middle of the hall.

A man holding a coffee tray turned around to see.

"He told this whole hospital last night that she isn't his," I said. "Now he's stealing her."

Giacomo's jaw tightened.

"Lower your voice," he said, very softly.

"No."

I took a step toward him, bleeding through my gown, and nobody tried to stop me.

"Her name is Daisy," I said. "She's one day old. She has no formula, no insurance, and no father on her birth form, because he wouldn't sign it."

A nurse came out from behind the desk.

Then another one.

"Sir," the first nurse said, "I'll need you to hand the baby back to her mother."

Giacomo looked down the hall.

There were five people watching him, and one of them had her phone raised.

He didn't have a driver he could tell to take them away, and no Family was in this hall to nod along.

He was only a man holding a child in public.

His arms lowered slowly.

The nurse took Daisy from him and laid her gently against my chest.

I felt her heartbeat through the thin blanket, fast and small.

Giacomo straightened his cuffs.

"You made a scene," he said.

"You carried my baby to a door."

"You'll walk out of here with nothing." His voice was low enough that only I could hear it. "The apartment is Family property. The accounts are in my name. Everything you eat, I paid for."

"You paid for it with my bracelet," I said.

A flicker went across his face.

Then he walked away, down the corridor, past the woman in the robe, who stepped aside to let him through.

Nobody said anything for a while.

One of the nurses took my elbow and walked me back to bed.

She didn't ask me anything.

She came back with a bottle of formula, a pack of diapers, and a ham sandwich on a paper plate.

"Eat," she said. "You're no use to her hungry."

I cried over the sandwich.

They discharged us the next afternoon.

The doctor had to sign the papers himself, because my insurance had lapsed and the office staff didn't know what to do.

Nobody mentioned a bill.

I walked out through the lobby holding Daisy in a borrowed blanket, with the cashier's check zipped into the inside pocket of my coat.

I took a taxi to the bank first.

The teller made me wait while a manager looked at the check.

Then he cleared it into my own account, the one Giacomo had never looked at, the one I'd opened at twenty-two with the first money I made from the studio.

It was the only thing I owned that had never had his name on it.

I asked the driver to take us home.

The apartment was on the third floor of an old brick building on Federal Hill.

Giacomo had put it in the Family's name before we married, and I had never wondered why.

I climbed the stairs one at a time with the baby on my shoulder.

My key went into the lock and stopped halfway.

I tried again.

It would not turn.

I stood in the hallway and listened.

Inside, somebody moved a chair.

I knocked, and the door opened a hand's width on a chain.

A man I'd seen in the Family's kitchens looked out at me.

"Mrs. Ferraro. The boss said not to let you in."

"This is my home."

"He said to tell you it was a rental."

"Where are my things?"

He shut the door.

A moment later he opened it again, and a gray duffel bag slid across the threshold, and then another one.

The third bag was a garbage bag tied at the neck.

I picked up the garbage bag and looked inside.

My coats. My mother's cookbook. A framed photo of the day I opened my studio.

Giacomo had not even taken the time to find a suitcase.

I carried the three bags down the stairs, one at a time, with Daisy strapped to my front and my body screaming at every step.

On the sidewalk I put them in a row.

It had started to snow.

I stood there and tried to think of one person in the city I could call.

I had spent six years being Mrs. Ferraro.

My friends had been his friends.

My phone had eleven contacts, and three of them were wives of capos.

Daisy began to cry.

I rocked her, and the snow came down on her hat, and I did not know where we would sleep.

A black car was parked across the street with its engine running.

I had not noticed it before.

The back door opened, and a tall man in a gray overcoat stepped onto the curb.

There was a pale scar under his jaw.

I knew his face, because Giacomo had pointed to it at a dozen dinners and called its owner a snake.

"Mrs. Ferraro," Santo Rinaldi said, and crossed the street toward me through the snow.

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