Seven Weeks Pregnant, until I Found His Secret Chat novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cook Your Own Lamb
Casey reads the Brancato family chat, answers in Italian and walks out. The family head orders her stopped.
At six on Saturday evening I was alone in my kitchen with twelve pounds of lamb for my father-in-law's seventieth birthday.
Dario had left at four with a garment bag and a kiss on my forehead.
"Business in Atlantic City," he'd said. "Back Sunday by noon. You'll have the lamb ready?"
"It'll be ready," I said.
I was seven weeks pregnant, and I had told him so that morning.
He had held my face in both hands and said his father would be overjoyed.
I rubbed rosemary and garlic into the meat, and my phone buzzed on the counter.
It was his mother.
She always wrote to me in plain English, because I was shy about the family's language.
"Use the big roasting pan, cara. And don't forget Thursday at ten. I booked you with the family doctor. He has delivered every baby in this family."
I had not asked her to book anything.
I typed a thank-you and a heart, because that was how I had always answered her.
Then Dario's old iPad lit up beside the fruit bowl.
He kept it on the charger in our kitchen and never took it anywhere.
The screen showed a group chat called "Brancato Family & Crew," with nine names on it.
I knew the name.
Nobody had ever added me to it.
In six years of marriage, I had watched the family laugh at their phones across the Sunday table, and I had always smiled along.
For seven years I had also been learning Italian, every night after Dario fell asleep, from apps and library books and one old teacher in Hoboken.
Dario thought I had given up in the second year.
I had never told him otherwise.
I wiped the garlic off my hands and picked up the iPad.
A message from a woman named Gianna Marchetti sat at the top.
"My door is unlocked tonight. Dario knows the way."
Under it, his sister had added four laughing faces.
I read the line again.
Then I opened the translator on my phone and typed it in, to be sure I had not made a mistake.
I had not.
I scrolled up.
At noon, Dario had sent a payment of four thousand dollars to Gianna Marchetti.
Under it he had written: "For the weekend. Buy something nice."
Then another line, a minute later.
"Casey stays home. Tell her to season the lamb and keep her phone quiet."
His mother had answered with a red heart.
Nobody had objected.
Eight people had read it, and every one of them had eaten at my table.
I felt sick, and then I felt very clear.
I scrolled higher with my thumb steady, because if it shook I would drop the iPad.
At seven that morning, an hour after I told Dario about the baby, he had written to all of them.
"She's seven weeks. Papa, it's confirmed."
His father had answered: "At last."
His mother had written: "Thank God. Now we wait and keep her calm."
I did not understand that one.
I read it twice and put it aside, because the next message was worse.
Gianna had been his Wednesday nights for fourteen months.
His sister had covered for him at Christmas.
His mother had known all of it.
There was one name in the member list that never wrote anything.
Renzo Brancato, the eldest son, who had not been at a family dinner in five years.
I did not know why he was still in the chat.
I did not care yet.
I stood in my kitchen and let myself have one breath.
I was not going to cry over the lamb.
I picked up the iPad again and tapped the box at the bottom.
I wrote in Italian, slowly, correcting every verb.
"Buonasera. This is Casey. I read all of it. Cook your own lamb."
I pressed send.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then the little dots appeared under three different names at once.
Gianna wrote: "Oh no."
His sister wrote: "She can READ?"
Dario's name stayed gray.
He was on the highway and had not seen it yet.
I took my suitcase from the hall closet, the one I had packed for the hospital in my head every night since the test.
I put my passport, the iPad and my prenatal vitamins into it.
I left my wedding ring on the cutting board, next to the lamb.
So I stepped out.
I was halfway down the front path when the iPad buzzed in my bag.
I stopped under the porch light and looked.
Salvatore Brancato, the head of the family, had finally written.
"Dario. Turn the car around."
A second line came in under it.
"She does not leave this family with that child."
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