Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: The Timone
The Timone hospital smelled of floor polish and burnt coffee at five in the morning.
We sat on two plastic chairs in the corridor outside the cardiac ward, with my sweater buttoned wrong and his shirt untucked.
The doctor had taken Marie-Ange behind a curtain an hour before.
Nobody had told us anything since.
Antone sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging between them.
I had never seen him still without being in control of it.
"She raised us," he said, to the floor.
"Marie-Ange?"
"My mother died when I was twelve," he said.
"Marie-Ange moved into the house with one suitcase and never moved out. She taught me to iron a collar."
He rubbed his face.
"She taught Mattei to dance."
I waited.
"Mattei would have been thirty-five in March," he said.
It was the first time he had said his brother's name in the light of an ordinary morning.
I slid my hand into his, and he let me.
"I needed it to be somebody," Antone said. "For eleven years."
"Why?"
"There was a fog and a collision and my brother in the water."
He looked up at the ceiling lights.
"Somebody had to be at fault, or it was only the sea," he said.
"And it was my father," I said.
"It was a name I could say. It gave me somewhere to put it."
His thumb moved on my knuckles.
"I am not saying that is right. I am saying it is what I did."
I thought of my father, hunched over a glass at the kitchen table at four in the afternoon, telling the wall he was sorry.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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