He Loved Me in Secret, Until I Became Someone He Could Never Have novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Bank on High Street

Home at her family's bank, Renata learns what the Accord means and refuses Tullio's ring in front of the lobby, and he tells her to ask Dario who ordered her kept small.

I took a cab to High Street with my Harbor binder on my knees.

The driver asked if I was okay.

I told him I'd just quit my job, and he said, "Good for you, hon," and turned up the Orioles.

Mazzola Savings & Trust sat between a pastry shop and a shoe repair, three stories of brick with gold letters on the glass.

My great-grandmother had painted those letters.

My mother had touched them up every spring since.

Inside, the lobby smelled like floor wax and anise cookies.

Four customers stood in line.

Three old tellers worked the brass windows, the same three who'd slipped me lollipops when I was six.

The tallest one saw me first and dropped her pen.

"Rosaria," she called. "She's here. She's actually here."

My mother came around the counter in her flour-dusted cardigan and grabbed my face with both hands.

"You quit," she said.

"How do you know that?"

"Because you're here on a Thursday. Did you eat?"

"Ma."

"Did you eat?"

"No."

She pushed a cookie into my hand and pulled me toward the back room.

My father sat in a wheelchair by the window.

Three weeks ago he'd been a man who walked to the harbor every morning and argued with the gulls.

Now his right hand lay curled in his lap.

The right side of his mouth didn't move when he saw me.

The left side did.

"Na...ta," he said.

It took him a long breath to get both halves out.

I knelt and put my forehead on his good hand.

He smelled like the same aftershave.

That was the part that broke me.

My mother let me cry for a minute.

Then she pulled a chair up beside us and opened a leather folder on her knees.

Inside was one yellowed page, typed on a machine older than the building's furnace.

"You know what this is," she said.

"The Accord."

"Read it again. Out loud."

I knew most of it by heart.

Every Family between Philadelphia and Richmond keeps a peace bond here.

The money sits in the vault and nobody touches it.

It's a promise not to start a war.

The Keeper of the Ledger takes no side, and shall not marry a man who holds a seat at any table.

I stopped there.

"Keep going," my mother said.

"If the Mazzola line has no Keeper, the Ledger is opened and the bonds are divided among the Families."

"And who gets the biggest piece?"

"The biggest Family."

"Which is?"

"The Venturis."

She closed the folder.

"Your father can't hold a pen with his right hand anymore," she said. "The bosses will meet in this room a week from Sunday. Either you swear in, or this bank stops existing."

"And Tullio wants me married before then."

"He brought roses this afternoon. Two dozen. I gave them to the shoe repair."

My father made a sound in his throat.

It was a laugh.

I'd know it anywhere.

The bell over the front door rang.

The lobby went quiet in a way I felt through the wall.

My mother stood up and smoothed her cardigan.

"He came back," she said.

Tullio Venturi stood in the middle of our lobby in a camel overcoat with rain on the shoulders.

Two of his men waited by the door with their hands folded in front of them.

The customers in line had stopped pretending to fill out deposit slips.

"Renata!" Tullio opened his arms. "Look at you. Home where you belong."

He kissed both my cheeks before I could step back.

His cologne was the same one he'd worn at my First Communion.

"Mr. Venturi."

"Tullio. Please. We're nearly family."

He took a small velvet box out of his coat pocket and opened it on my mother's counter.

The diamond was the size of a chickpea.

The tallest teller made a small sound.

"My son is shy," Tullio said, loud enough for the line. "So his father does the asking. You and Dario, Saturday, Saint Leo's. My treat. Your father won't have to lift a finger."

"Did Dario send you?"

"Dario does what's good for the Family."

That wasn't an answer.

I looked at the ring.

I looked at the old woman in line holding her grandson's hand.

I looked at my father's wheelchair, which my mother had rolled into the back room doorway so he could see.

"No," I said.

Tullio smiled wider.

"You're upset. Today was hard. I heard."

"You heard I quit an hour and a half ago?"

"I hear everything about my people."

"I'm not your people," I said. "I'm a Mazzola. On Sunday I'll be the Keeper. And the Keeper doesn't marry Venturis."

I closed the velvet box and pushed it back across the counter with one finger.

Somebody in the line clapped once and then stopped, horrified.

Tullio picked up the box.

He didn't stop smiling.

That was worse than if he'd yelled.

He leaned down so only I could hear him.

His breath smelled like espresso and anisette.

"Five years you worked for my son," he said softly. "You never wondered why he kept you small?"

My heart was pounding in my ears.

"Ask him," Tullio said. "He was doing it for me."

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