My Father Traded Me for the Don's Sister, So I Married the Don novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: The Stoop

I kept walking, and the voice behind me said it again.

"Raffi."

It did not get louder.

In twenty-six years I had never heard my father say anything to my back, because I had never once walked away from him.

I reached the car.

Luca opened the rear door, and Gemma climbed in after me, and Rosalba got in on the other side with her rosary already out.

Nobody spoke until Silvio had turned onto Hylan Boulevard.

"Dongan Hills," I said.

Luca looked at me.

"I want my mother's photograph," I said. "Now, before he gets home and hangs a towel over it."

"I'll come in with you."

"You'll wait at the curb."

He didn't argue.

He nodded once, and I watched something in his shoulders let go.

The brick house looked smaller than it had a month before.

The stoop my mother scrubbed every Saturday was grey with salt.

Silvio parked across the street, and I got out with the key I had never given back.

I had not counted on my father being faster than the car.

He sat on the third step in his good grey suit with his hands hanging between his knees.

His men had set him down at the corner and gone, and he had walked the last block alone.

His moustache had lost its comb.

I crossed the street and went up the path.

He lifted his head.

"Raffi."

I did not stop.

I climbed the steps beside him, close enough to smell the cologne he'd worn to the Villa Calabria that morning, and I put the key in the door.

"You are making a mistake," he said to the wood.

"Probably."

"Your mother would have wanted," he said.

"Don't."

I said it quietly.

He closed his mouth.

The hall was dim, and the photograph hung beside the stairs, where he could see it from his chair.

My mother laughed out at me in her green dress, thirty years old, with flour on her wrist.

I took it off the nail, and the wall behind it was paler than the rest.

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