The Don's Animal-Talking Little Girl novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Agata's Room

I didn't wait for morning.

I walked down the landing barefoot in his T-shirt and knocked on Teo's door until it opened.

He was in an undershirt with a whiskey in his hand, wide awake.

His eyes went down my bare legs and came back up, slowly.

"Wrong room," he said.

"Right room." I held up the paper. "Under Agata's mattress. The cat found it."

He looked at the handwriting and the color went out of his face.

He took it from me.

"Teo, if you find this, it was N," I read out loud. "Who's N?"

"Nobody."

"Who did she call N?"

He didn't answer.

"Teo. You agreed. The truth, even when I won't like it."

He set the whiskey on the hall table very carefully.

"When she was little," he said, "she couldn't say Ignazio. She called him Zio Nazio. Uncle Nazio. She stopped when she was eight."

I let that sit.

"Then she started again," I said.

"No." His voice went flat and cold. "You're doing what she did."

"What did she do?"

"She saw enemies everywhere that last year. My father's men. The cook. Me. She said people were following her. She said my father's heart attack was strange." He shook his head. "She was twenty-three and in love with someone she wouldn't name and frightened of her own shadow."

"Maybe she was right."

"She was grieving."

"And you're doing it now," I said. "Some piece of paper tells you something you don't want to hear, and you decide she was crazy. That's easier."

He turned on me.

He didn't raise his voice. He never did. He just came closer until I had my back against the cold plaster.

"I raised her," he said. "Our mother died when I was seventeen and she was ten. My father was never home. I packed her lunches. I signed her report cards with his name. I sat up with her when she had nightmares and I taught her to drive and I scared off every boy in Bloomfield."

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