Oops, My Online Ex Is the Mafia Don novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Chapter Fourteen

Raimondo reads her own chapter aloud and promises the Family will judge the man who fed it to her, and at 2 a.m. Siobhan asks nightshift whether the stories were real.

Nobody had called me honeybee out loud in my whole life.

It sounded wrong in a man's mouth.

It sounded like a hand on my neck.

"I don't know who that is," I said.

"Sure you don't, sweetheart."

He tucked the coin purse into his cardigan pocket.

"Raimondo Tedesco. Luciano's uncle. I'm the one who does the worrying in our family."

Behind me, Bernie's car door opened.

"Shiv, get back in the car."

"It's fine," I said, which was the first lie of the night.

"Your father let me in on his way out," Raimondo said. "He had somewhere to be. He usually does, these days."

My stomach dropped.

"Come inside," he said. "It's getting cold, and I brought something to read."

I should have gotten in the car.

I followed him into my own kitchen instead, because the alternative was letting him stay in it alone.

He had already made himself at home.

His jacket hung on my father's chair.

My father's iPad lay on the counter by the bread box, and his hand rested on it.

A stack of printed pages sat on the island under a jar of my mother's old honey.

I recognized the font.

It was the app's font.

Bernie came in behind me with her phone out and her thumb over the nine.

"Bernadette," Raimondo said warmly. "The cousin with the scissors. Sit down, sweetheart."

"I'll stand."

"Suit yourself."

He put on his reading glasses and lifted the first page.

"Chapter fourteen," he read. "'Behind the Freezer.'"

I stopped breathing.

He read it beautifully.

He read my heroine walking through the fish house on the river at night, through the cold blue light, past the hanging scales.

He read the freezer door with the bad hinge.

He read the second door behind the frozen squid, the steel one, painted white so you'd miss it.

He read the counting machines and the rubber bands sorted by color, and the old man who only counted in fives.

I had written every word of it at three in the morning, giddy.

Nightshift had told me his uncle used to tell that story at Christmas.

"Lovely," Raimondo said. "Very vivid. You have a real ear."

"It's fiction."

"It's Delaware Avenue." He took his glasses off and let them hang. "Built in twenty twenty-three. White door. The hinge squeaks. Fives."

"Who did you get it from, honeybee?"

"I made it up."

"No," he said gently. "You didn't. Somebody sat at our table and then went home and told a girl on the internet. Do you know what our table does to a man like that?"

I didn't answer.

He told me anyway, in the same soft voice he'd used to read.

"'Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps his soul from troubles.' Proverbs. My mother had it over the sink."

He tapped the pages square.

"Soon the table hears it. I bring your chapters. The table finds the man. Then the man is judged."

"Judged how?"

He smiled at me.

He didn't say.

"Who do you think it was?" Bernie snapped. "Since you're doing all the worrying."

"Oh, I don't think, sweetheart. I read."

He never said a name.

He let the silence say it for him.

He slid one page across to me.

It was the comment section under chapter one.

The first comment, the first one I ever got, from January last year.

nightshift: "Couldn't put it down. Who taught you about Sunday tables?"

"Somebody did," Raimondo said, and put his jacket on.

At the door he turned back and patted my cheek with two dry fingers.

"Congratulations on Saturday. I hope you'll write about the wedding."

Then the silver Lincoln was gone, and the kitchen smelled like his cologne.

Bernie locked the door and put the chain on.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. We call the cops."

"And tell them what? A nice old man read me my own book?"

"He threatened you!"

"He quoted Proverbs at me."

"In this city that's a threat!"

I sat down on the floor with my back against the dishwasher.

The pages were still in my hand.

My heroine, my freezer, my fives.

His freezer.

His uncle's story.

Bernie stayed over in the guest room.

My father didn't come home.

At two in the morning I was still awake under my fan, with my laptop on my knees and the reading app open.

I hadn't opened our messages in six months.

The thread was still there.

His last line was still at the bottom.

You'll know it the day you need it.

I typed with two fingers, the way you'd touch a stove.

"Were they real?"

I hit send before I could stop myself.

The little dots appeared before I'd even put the phone down.

Six months, and he answered in nine seconds.

"Every word."

I stared at it until the screen dimmed.

Every word.

The freezer and the count room and the Sunday table and the rule about wives.

He'd handed me a gun one bullet at a time, and called it bedtime stories.

And now his uncle was going to stand up at that table with my chapters and find the man who did it.

There was only one man who did it.

I thought about the check in four pieces in his wastebasket.

The yellow dress.

"Since it mattered."

And the rule about wives, which I'd put in chapter nine.

At the Sunday table, nobody questions a man's wife.

Nobody touches her without him.

Then I sat up and typed a long message, deleted it, and typed a short one.

"Then I'm marrying you. My terms. Be awake at six."

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