He Replaced His Wife and Lost His Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fifth Seat
At the Greco family portrait dinner Daniele seats his assistant in the wife's chair for the fifth time; Cara puts twelve keys and two ledgers on the table and texts her brother to come take her home, and he answers that he is coming for the keys.
The photographer said, "Mrs. Greco, would you mind stepping out of the frame?"
I was already standing in it, holding the hem of a stranger's dress.
Genevieve Redford was in the wife's chair at the center of the Greco family portrait, and the hem had caught on the chair leg.
"Thank you, Cara," she said, and she meant it. "I'd have tripped on it."
She was wearing the pearls.
They were the long strand that the lady of the house wears to the annual dinner, and they had never been mine.
My husband stood behind her chair with his hand on the back of it.
Daniele had spent the morning telling me how the evening would go.
"She's new at these dinners," he'd said, straightening his cuffs in the mirror. "Be gracious to her tonight."
I straightened the hem and stepped out.
Twenty feet of table waited behind the photographer, with Greco captains down both sides and men from three allied families at the far end.
Every one of them was watching me.
They had watched me four times before, and four times I had smiled and sat at the foot of the table.
They wanted to see whether I would lose my temper this year.
Daniele's grandmother, Agnese, sat in the second chair with her silver cane across her knees.
Genevieve had taken her other arm.
Agnese looked at me over Genevieve's shoulder and did not smile.
Five years ago a Greco aunt had taken my place at the portrait, and Daniele had called it a family courtesy.
The next year it was a cousin's wife, then a visiting man's daughter, then a family friend.
I had counted every one of them.
Each year the night before the dinner my brother Paolo called me from California.
"Don't fight for the chair, Cari," he said, every time. "Not once. Just tell me the count."
I told him the count, and he said he loved me.
This year the count was five.
Genevieve leaned toward me while the photographer fiddled with a light.
"Cara, he told me to sit here," she said quietly. "I said he should ask you first."
"He doesn't ask," I said.
"No," she said. "I guess he doesn't."
She did not look sorry enough to stand up.
Daniele looked at me then, over her head.
He was patient and sure of me.
"The light's on you, Cara," he said. "Either stand still or go sit down."
The twelve keys hung on a ring at my waist, where they had hung for five years.
Each one opened a counting room in New York or New Jersey.
The two ledgers lay on the sideboard behind my place, where the captains expected them every year, written in a shorthand I had made up myself.
I had kept every house for this family, and every dollar and every debt they owed each other.
I walked past the photographer and the twenty feet of table to the empty place I always sat in.
I set the ring of keys down on the white cloth, and the keys rang against a plate.
I took the two ledgers off the sideboard and set them beside the keys, and a captain near me stopped chewing.
Nobody spoke.
I did not take the necklace.
I did not say a word to Genevieve, because she had not done this.
"Cara," Daniele said. His voice had gone flat. "Pick those up."
"No."
"We're doing the portrait."
"Then take it without me."
One of the allied men set down his glass.
Daniele crossed the room and stopped close enough that only I could hear him.
"You will take those back," he said. "You can't read half of what's in them even if you leave, and I can't read any of it."
He had never said that aloud before.
It was the truest thing he had ever told me, and he had said it to make me stay.
"You're right," I said. "Nobody else can."
I picked up my coat from the back of the chair.
So I walked out.
Nobody stopped me at the dining room door, or in the hall, or on the steps.
The cold outside was clean, and my hands were shaking.
I took my phone out in the gravel drive and typed to my brother with my thumbs stiff.
That was the fifth. I'm done. Come and get me.
I was crossing to the gate when it buzzed in my hand.
Paolo had answered in less than a minute.
Finally. Stay where you are. I'm coming for the keys.
I read it twice.
He had written the keys, and he had not written me.
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