He Took His Childhood Friend Away, So I Came Back a Mafia Heiress novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Silent Treatment
Rocco announces a month in Capri with Sabrina in front of the family, Gemma signs the divorce papers already waiting in the drawer, and an old man at the gate calls her by her father's name.
On the third day of the silent treatment, my husband announced at Sunday dinner that he was taking his childhood friend to Capri for a month.
Every person at the long table stopped chewing.
He didn't look at me when he said it.
He cut his veal and spoke to the tablecloth.
"She's had a rough year. She needs the sun, and I need the quiet."
"The quiet," I said.
It was the first word I had spoken to him in three days.
His eyes came up for half a second, then went back down.
He thought I was about to cry.
Sabrina laid her hand over mine on the cloth, and her fingers were warm.
"Gem, don't be upset. It's only a trip. I told him he should bring you."
"Did you?"
"Of course I did." She squeezed my hand and turned her phone face down beside her plate. "He's just stubborn. He'll come around, you'll see."
She had been saying that for three days.
She had also brought me tea every night and sat on the end of my bed while I didn't drink it.
Across the table, Rocco's uncle Nunzio wiped his mouth.
He was fifty-eight and silver-haired, and he ran the money for the whole family.
"Gemma," he said, gently, as if to a child. "You still haven't signed the form I left you."
The form was a stack of papers in a blue folder.
He had pushed it across to me at the christening party on Thursday.
I had said I wouldn't sign it until I read every page.
Nobody in this family told Nunzio no, and my husband hadn't spoken to me since.
"I read it," I said. "It says I give up any claim through my birth family."
"A formality," Nunzio said.
"Then it can wait until I understand it. I don't know who I'd be giving it to, or what I'd be giving up."
Rocco put his fork down.
"Gemma. Sign it."
It was the second thing he had said to me in three days, and it was an order.
I touched the chain at my neck.
The old black iron key under my collar was the only thing I owned from my father's house.
Rocco had once told me it was ugly and I should take it off.
I never had.
"No," I said.
His mother stared at her plate, and his cousins studied the ceiling.
Sabrina patted my hand again.
"We'll talk about this when I get back," Rocco said, and he stood.
He left the room without finishing his meal.
That night I did what I had done every night for three years.
I lay in the dark and listened to him walk through the house.
He went to the kitchen last.
I heard the stove knobs click, one after another, all six of them.
He checked them every night, even the nights he wasn't speaking to me.
Then his steps went down the hall to the guest room instead of ours.
I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about those three years.
I was twelve when his father took me in.
I was twenty-four when his father, dying, asked his son to marry the orphan in the east wing.
I had been so grateful for the room, the food and the name that I had never once asked what I was.
"You're a guest in this house," Rocco had said at the christening, in front of everyone. "Remember that."
I remembered it now.
I went down to his study, because he kept his important papers in the left drawer of his desk and never locked it.
On top lay a cream envelope with my name typed on the front.
Inside were divorce papers, already signed in his square black hand.
The date at the top was three weeks old.
That was before the christening and before Sabrina's little fall on the stairs, before any of the reasons he had given me for his anger.
He had decided long ago, and the silence had only been waiting for the trip.
I read every page twice.
There was no money in it for me, and no house.
There was not one word about where I would sleep.
I took a pen from his desk and signed my name under his.
Then I went upstairs and packed one bag.
Two dresses, my passport, and the only photograph I had of my father.
I left my ring on Rocco's pillow in the guest room.
Nobody stopped me, and I knew every board in the hall.
I walked down the drive to the gate with the bag on my shoulder and the key against my chest.
A taxi idled in the rain on the other side of the bars.
An old man in a worn grey overcoat stood beside it, holding a leather case to his chest.
His glasses were wet, and his shoes were soaked through.
He had been standing there a long time.
"Signora," he said, and his voice cracked. "Signora Rinaldi."
Nobody had called me that in sixteen years.
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