Seven Days Before the Mafia Princess Died novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: April

Bianca left without being asked.

She stood, wiped her face on the sleeve of the gray coat, and went past my mother in the doorway.

My mother let her go.

Then she came in and shut the door behind her.

She did not sit on the bed.

She pulled the chair from the wall, set it down a yard from me, and lowered herself into it with her purse on her knees.

"Last April," she said, "the doctor came to the house on a Tuesday."

"I know about the letter."

"You know what he told you. You don't know what I saw."

She opened the purse.

Out of it she took a folded sheet of yellow paper, soft with handling, and held it out across the gap.

I didn't take it.

"It's the first page of the radiologist's report," she said. "He had it in his coat. It fell out when he took his glasses out. I picked it up while he was in the kitchen with the girl making coffee."

I looked at the paper.

"I read two lines," my mother said. "Mass in the stomach wall. Suggest urgent biopsy."

"You read it a year ago."

"Yes."

"And then?"

"And then he came back, and he told me it was nothing. A nervous stomach. He was sweating." Her voice didn't change. "I have known that man for thirty-one years. He doesn't sweat."

"You knew."

"I knew he was lying. I didn't know what about."

"That isn't true."

She was silent for a moment.

"No," she said. "It isn't."

She put the yellow page on the blanket by my knee.

"I knew it was your illness. I knew it from the way you looked at your food. And your father said you were angling for attention, and Bianca was crying in the next room, and the whole house was so quiet."

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