My Mafia Husband Faked Amnesia, So I Took His Empire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Anniversary Stranger
Teo wakes and asks who the crying woman is; that night Mara hears him laugh that it is an act, records it, and signs her power over to Sheridan with a smile.
At six that morning my husband woke up in a private clinic room and asked the nurse who had let this woman in.
The woman was me.
I was holding his hand. Eleven of his men were standing in the doorway, and every one of them heard it.
"Teo, it's Mara," I said. "I'm your wife."
He pulled his hand out of mine and looked at me politely, with the face he kept for strangers.
"I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't know you."
Someone had shot at his car on our sixth anniversary. One bullet had grazed his skull.
The doctor who had stitched him up said he remembered the whole Family, every street and every debt.
He remembered everyone in the world except me.
For six years I had run the money for my husband. Nine accounts, nine bookkeepers and one signature that opened them.
I had turned a street captain into the man every family in the city paid.
Now he turned his own wedding ring on his finger and frowned at it.
Benny, his cousin, rubbed his jaw. "Rare thing, boss. They say it can come back."
Behind Benny stood the new art curator, Sheridan, with two paper cups in her hands.
She had been hired three weeks ago to run the gallery wing in Chelsea. I had met her twice.
She pushed through the men and held a cup out to me.
"You haven't eaten," she said. "Oat milk, right? I asked your housekeeper."
I took it. My hands were shaking.
"I found the number for the family doctor, too," she said. "The one who knows his history. He's the one who can tell us how to fix this."
"Thank you," I said, and I meant it.
"He told me these cases clear up in a few days," she said. "Try not to panic."
I wondered for a second when she had talked to him, since I had been calling him since dawn.
Then I let it go. I was tired, and she was the only person in that doorway who was kind to me.
In my purse, under my phone, I carried my father's steel pocket watch on its chain.
I wound it in the corridor while the men filed out. I did it every night. Teo had never once asked whose it was.
I spent the day looking for the doctor.
His office said he was at a conference. His house in Westchester said he was in the city. His cell went to voicemail a dozen times.
At noon the clinic discharged Teo to the penthouse. Benny drove him.
At midnight I let myself in with my key.
The living room was dark except for the city in the windows.
I heard a woman gasp, and I thought, for one stupid second, that something was wrong with him.
Then I stepped around the corner.
My husband had Sheridan against the floor-to-ceiling glass, her palms flat on it and her dress shoved up around her waist.
He was behind her, one fist in her honey-colored hair, moving hard.
"Say I get the keys," she panted. "Say it, Teo. Please."
He laughed in her ear.
"Stop begging. You get them tomorrow, and the wife signs them over herself."
My phone was already in my hand.
I hit record.
"The doctor was worth every dollar," Teo said. "I tell the room I remember everything but her, and nobody argues. A man who can't recall his own wife can't be held to what he promised her."
"For three days," Sheridan said.
"For the settlement. The Commission wants the money moved by Friday, and she's the only one who can move it. So she steps aside, you sit in her chair, and Friday I put it all back."
He pushed her harder against the glass. She cried out.
"She won't even fight me," he said. "She sat at my bed all morning crying. She believed every word."
I stood there with my cup of oat milk going cold in my other hand.
The nurse's face came back to me, and the men lined up in the doorway, and the way he had pulled his hand out of mine.
I had been sorry for him. I had been sorry for him all day.
Sheridan turned her head, laughing, and looked straight past his shoulder at the dark hallway.
I did not move. She could not see me.
She turned back to the glass.
I could have walked in and thrown the cup in his face.
I could have screamed until the doormen came up.
Instead I stopped the recording and sent it to the one account Teo had never known I had.
Then I put my father's watch back in my purse, and I let myself out as quietly as I had come in.
So I decided to let them think it had worked.
At nine the next morning, twelve of his captains sat around the long table in the brownstone on East 72nd.
Benny stood with a paper in his hand. "Under the circumstances, Mrs. Landolfi's signing authority is suspended. Miss Wellington will sign the settlement."
Sheridan sat in my chair, her hands folded and her eyes lowered like a woman who hated being asked.
Teo sat at the head of the table and did not look at me.
Only Fausto, the old consigliere, kept his eyes on mine.
I picked up the pen.
"Of course," I said. "Whatever helps him heal."
I signed in my neatest hand and slid the paper across to Sheridan.
She smiled at me. "Thank you, Mara. I'll take care of everything."
"I know you will," I said.
On the laptop in front of Benny, the settlement clock read 71:12:09.
Nobody in that room knew that every one of the nine accounts opened only for my voice.
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