My Mafia Husband Chose My Sister, So I Chose My Lost Love novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Pills
In the tenth year of her marriage Annalisa learns her husband has chosen her pregnant sister, refuses him in front of the staff, and finds a photo of the man she thought drowned.
By the tenth year of my marriage to Renato Vescari, I had stopped caring where he slept.
I didn't ask which apartment he went to after midnight.
I didn't smell his collars anymore.
I didn't wonder if he loved me. I had stopped wondering that in year three.
On the first of every month, the family doctor sent a small white bag up to the house.
Inside was a pack of birth control pills with my name typed on the label.
I had never asked for them.
Renato had never once explained them.
I swallowed one every morning with my coffee, standing at the kitchen island, while the housekeeper pretended not to watch.
That October night, the bag came at dinner.
I took the first pill of the new pack right there at the table, alone, in front of a plate of veal I hadn't touched.
The housekeeper cleared her throat.
"Mr. Vescari called, signora. He's coming home tonight."
"Tonight?"
He hadn't come home on a weeknight since August.
He came in after ten.
I heard the gate, then the front door, then his shoes on the marble.
Then I heard a second set of footsteps.
Small ones. Heels.
I was in the study with the ledgers open, the way I was most nights.
For nine years I had kept the Vescari books.
The trucking company. The port lease that used to be my father's. Three restaurants on Federal Hill.
Every number in every column was mine.
Renato stopped in the doorway with his coat still on.
He didn't come in. He never came into this room. He said numbers gave him a headache.
"Annalisa."
"You're home early."
"I'm going to say this once, and I don't want a scene."
He spoke low.
"Gia is pregnant. Eleven weeks. It's mine."
I set my pen down.
Gia was my little sister.
She was twenty-three.
I had braided her hair for her First Communion. I had paid for her apartment on Thayer Street for three years with money I earned in this exact room.
"She's moving into the house tonight," Renato said. "The blue suite. Have the girl make up the bed."
"Into my house."
"Into my house." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "My son is going to grow up under my roof."
"Your son."
"The doctor says a boy."
I looked at the little white bag on the corner of my desk.
Ten years of pills.
He had never wanted a child from me.
He had been waiting for a better one.
"And me?" I asked.
He shrugged out of his coat, finally, and folded it over his arm.
"Nothing changes for you. You keep the books. You keep the name for now. When it's time, my lawyer handles a quiet annulment and you'll be taken care of. Nobody needs to make it ugly."
Behind him, in the hallway, I saw Gia.
She had on a cream wool coat I had bought her last Christmas.
One hand was resting on her stomach.
She didn't look sorry.
She looked like a girl standing outside a store window, deciding which dress she wanted.
"Annalisa," she said softly. "I didn't plan it. It just happened."
The housekeeper was at the foot of the stairs with an armful of towels. Renato's driver was holding two pink suitcases by the door.
They were all watching me.
Ten years in this house had taught me the right thing to do.
Nod. Make up the bed. Go back to the numbers.
I stood up.
I walked past Renato into the hallway.
I took my wedding ring off and set it on the silver tray on the hall table, where the driver leaves the car keys.
The ring rang against the metal.
"Make up the blue suite yourself," I told the housekeeper. "I don't work for her."
Then I looked at my husband.
"I want a divorce, Renato. Not an annulment. A divorce, with my name on it."
The driver set the suitcases down very slowly.
Renato smiled.
It was the smile he used on men who owed him money.
"Go to bed, Annalisa. You're tired."
He took Gia's elbow and walked her up the stairs.
I heard the door of the blue suite close.
I went back into the study and locked the door.
My hands were shaking, so I did the only thing that ever made them stop.
I opened the books.
Not the clean ones. The real ones.
There was one line I had paid every quarter for ten years without asking about it.
Consulting. Six thousand dollars. A private investigator in Bangor, Maine.
Renato had told me it was security work. I had never looked further.
Tonight I logged into the account I wasn't supposed to know the password to.
There was a folder named for the investigator.
Inside were forty folders, one for every quarter.
I opened the newest one.
It was a photo of a boatyard in the fall, gray water, a man in a work jacket bent over the hull of a wooden boat.
He was older. He had a beard now.
But I knew the shape of his shoulders. I had cried over them at the India Point pier for a whole winter.
Sandro Ferlito.
The boy I was going to marry at nineteen.
The boy the Vescaris told me had drowned.
The photo was dated last Tuesday.
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