Chapter 16: The Parkway

Tiberio walked us out the front door.

My father stood at the top of the stairs with his hands folded, and he didn't raise his voice.

"If you leave with her, you don't come back through this door."

"I know, Papa," Tiberio said.

"You'll lose the seat. You'll lose the name."

"It's your name."

He took Nerina's other arm, and we went down the steps together.

The two men on the stoop watched us go and did nothing.

At the curb, Ruggero was out of the car before I reached it.

Rosa was asleep in her car seat on the back seat, wrapped in a gray blanket.

Nerina stopped on the sidewalk.

She looked at him.

He looked back, with both hands open, and said nothing at all.

"I'm not getting in with you," she said.

"The airport is thirty minutes away," I told her. "There's a hotel next to it. We fly home at seven."

"Whose home?"

"Mine. Yours, if you want it. Tonight, just get in."

She got in.

Ruggero drove, and Tiberio rode in front.

I sat in the back between Rosa's seat and my sister, and I kept two fingers on her wrist.

For ten minutes the streets of Brooklyn slid past, wet and orange under the lights.

Then the car swung up the ramp onto the parkway, and the road opened out ahead of us, black and fast.

Nerina went rigid.

"Mari."

"I'm here."

"Mari, I can't, it's dark, I can't be on this."

Her hand clamped over mine so hard that the bones ground together.

Her breath came short and high, and she stared straight ahead at the guardrail.

"It's all right," I said.

"There are lights behind us. They're coming up fast."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Left His Pregnant Bride at the Altar from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.