The Don's Dying Wish novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: Thirty Days

I went down the front stairs to meet her.

Our front door opens straight into the foyer, and the foyer opens into the main chapel, and Tiziana had already walked through both.

She was sitting in the front pew.

Twenty rows of empty folding chairs behind her.

She looked like the only mourner at her own party.

"Mrs. Brancato," I said. "Can I help you with an arrangement?"

She smiled at the altar.

"You've made one already, haven't you?"

I didn't sit.

I stood in the aisle, the way I stand beside every family.

"Where is he?" she asked.

"Resting."

"In this place." "Among the dead."

"He's in good company," I said. "They don't lie to him."

She turned her head and looked at me properly for the first time.

"Let me make you understand something, Vittoria," she said. "Our arrangement was a wife in my house. A wife at his bedside. Under my roof."

"I'm still his wife."

"Then you can be his wife here, on your own money." She opened her purse and took out a folded paper. "Your father's note. Four hundred and ten thousand dollars. It was forgiven for a wife in my house. You left my house."

She held it out.

I didn't take it.

She set it on the pew beside her.

"Thirty days," she said. "From today. Or this building, these chairs, that crooked step, all of it belongs to my family."

"And you signed the waiver," she went on, as if I hadn't spoken. "Every claim on every Brancato dollar. So you can't pay me with his money. You can't pay for his nurses with it. You can't pay for anything."

"I don't need his money."

"Everybody needs money, sweetheart." She stood up and smoothed her skirt. "And a man in his condition needs so much care. Accidents happen. A tube comes loose. A fall on the stairs."

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