My Husband Called Me Useless, Now a Mafia Don Owes Me His Life novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Honey

"I used to sit with people while they were dying," I told Gia. "It taught me to count."

Gia looked at me for a long time.

"That's a lie," she said. "But it's a kind one."

She picked up her cup again.

"I'll get you a pharmacist. A woman who owes me a favor and has no reason to love anyone in this house."

She came at noon in a green raincoat, with a bag of white paper envelopes and a plastic case.

She was fifty, brisk and silent, and she didn't ask what it was for.

"Arsenic strips," she said. "Hardware stores sell them for well water. They're crude, but they don't lie much."

"Thank you," I said.

"Gia says it's family business," the pharmacist said. "I never heard it."

She left through the kitchen door without a coffee.

Gia and I spent the afternoon at the long pantry table, with every item that had reached Rocco's plate since March.

We tested the sugar, the salt, the coffee and the olive oil.

We tested the bread, the pasta and the wine.

We dissolved each one in a clean glass of water and dipped a strip.

Every strip stayed white.

By six, my back ached and Gia's glasses had slid down her nose.

"This is stupid," she said. "Thirty years of the same food, and he has been sick for four months."

"Then it isn't the food he's always eaten," I said. "It's something that started in the winter."

"What came in the winter?"

She stopped.

I watched her face change.

"The baskets," she said.

"What baskets?"

"Every quarter, Rensselaer Wealth sends the family a gift basket. Wine, chocolate, jam, a tin of honey from a farm in Sicily. It's tradition. Carson's idea."

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