My Don Chose My Best Friend-So I Took His Empire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Dinner Door
Gemma overhears her husband tell her best friend he loves her, plays it for the captains and takes off her ring, and Nino Pace follows her out.
For three years the whole Balestra family called me unstable, and tonight they did it again over a plate of veal.
I had said one sentence at the table.
I said there was a woman's gold earring in the glove box of my husband's car.
Forty people heard me. Dario's captains, their wives, his mother at the far end.
"Poor Gemma," a captain's wife said, loud enough for the whole room. "Again?"
Dario stood and came around the table to me.
"Come sit with me, Gem," he said, and he pulled out my chair. "You've carried a lot this week. Her father's anniversary is Thursday, everybody, be easy on her."
Every year on the day my father died, Dario goes to the cemetery alone first and sends the drivers away.
I have always thought it was grief.
So I sat down, and his mother passed me a glass of water.
My phone was in my lap, recording.
I had started it before the veal, so that someone, someday, would have my side.
Lidia found me in the hallway outside the powder room.
She put her hand on my arm, the same warm hand she had held out to me since nursing school.
"Gem, look at me. I'm always on your side. You know that."
I nodded. My mascara was running.
"But maybe," she said gently, "you are being a little too sensitive."
I wanted to scream.
Instead I cried, and Lidia held me, and I let her.
She was the only one in that house who had never once called me crazy to my face.
"Give me the earring," she said. "I'll ask around. There's a simple answer, I promise."
I put it in her palm.
She closed her fingers over it and slipped it into her cardigan pocket.
I decided to trust her. I decided that three years of being wrong had worn me down, not him.
I went back down the hall to get my shawl from Dario's study.
The door was open an inch.
"I can't do this anymore, Lidia."
It was Dario's voice, the low one he used on me when we were alone, years ago.
"I love you. I'm done hiding. I'm telling Gemma tonight."
My hand stopped on the door.
"No!" Lidia said. "Dario, please, not tonight. Gemma has done everything for me. She got me my job. She got me my apartment. It will destroy her."
"She'll live," Dario said.
"Three years she's been asking me with that face. I'm tired of lying to it."
I stood absolutely still.
My phone was still in my other hand, red dot on, and I had not stopped it.
I did not push the door.
I walked back to the dining room, past the captains' wives and the veal and his mother's water glass, and I set my phone in the middle of the table.
I pressed play.
The recording had caught the study door too, and both of their voices came out of the speaker, clear.
"I love you. I'm done hiding."
"Gemma has done everything for me."
Nobody ate.
A captain's wife put her fork down on her plate, very quietly.
Dario walked in with Lidia right behind him, and he saw the phone.
"Turn it off, Gemma."
"No."
Lidia's face went white.
"Gem, I wanted to tell you myself," she said. "I never wanted it like this."
I looked at her cardigan pocket.
Dario stared at me for a long moment, and then he smiled.
"Fine," he said. "You want it said in front of everyone? I chose Lidia."
His mother gasped, and then she looked at me, not at him.
Dario spread his hands for the room.
"A Don's wife doesn't leave, Gem. But go ahead. Walk out. Everything you are is my name."
I took off the Balestra ring.
I set it on the plate with the veal.
"Then keep it," I said. "I'm taking my father's name back."
He laughed.
"Let her go," he told the room. "Who is Alberto Sartori's daughter without a Balestra at her back?"
So I stepped out.
At the back wall, Dario's half-brother Santino watched me go and did not say a word.
I got as far as the front hall before I heard a chair scrape behind me.
Nino Pace stood at the end of the table, sixty-seven years old, bad knee and all.
He was my father's oldest captain and my godfather, and he did not look at Dario once.
He buttoned his overcoat and followed me.
A second chair scraped. Then a third.
Seven men who had carried my father's coffin stood up from Dario's table.
Dario stopped laughing.
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