The Don's Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: A Crib, Not Him

"Then why did she throw me out?" I said.

The old bodyguard opened the car door for me.

"Because if she believed you in front of that girl, you'd be dead by Tuesday," he said. "Go home, signora. Keep the babies close. Don't come here again until she sends for you."

Benedetta drove us home in silence for almost three miles.

Then she said, "Dandruff," and started laughing so hard she had to pull into a Walgreens lot.

I laughed too, until it hurt my stitches, until I was crying, and my son woke up and yelled at both of us.

Savino's Bakery sat in the middle of the 1000 block of Taylor Street, between the florist and the shoe repair.

I hadn't been home since my water broke on the floor.

Someone had mopped it.

The closed sign was still turned.

Under it, a card in shaky capitals said CLOSED FOR BABIES, BACK SOON, THE MANAGEMENT.

My father's old baker was coming out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron.

He was sixty-six and built like a flour sack.

He'd worked for my father for twenty years and for me for five, and he'd always had a key.

He looked at the car seats.

He put his hand over his mouth.

"Two," he said, through his fingers. "Madonna. Two."

"A boy and a girl."

"The girl looks like your mother," he said.

That night Benedetta moved in.

She didn't ask.

She came back from her apartment in Pilsen with a duffel bag, a laundry basket and a bottle of wine for later.

She also had a pack of nursing pads she'd bought "because I googled."

She took the second bedroom, the one I'd been painting yellow for a nursery.

"The babies sleep with you anyway," she said. "I sleep here. I do the two a.m. You do the five. Fair?"

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