The Don's Wife Stopped Asking novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Dark Foyer

Tancredi waits for her at midnight; she tells him about Friday and he goes still, then locks her in her room, and through the door she hears him say yes to someone three times.

The foyer light was off when I came home at midnight.

I knew he was there anyway.

Tancredi sat in the leather chair under the stairs, the one nobody else was allowed to use.

His jacket was gone and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow.

He did not get up.

"Eleven hours," he said. "You were gone eleven hours."

"I went to see my brother."

"You left my table."

"Yes."

"In front of my family."

"In front of all of them," I said. "Every single one."

Remo stood by the front door with his hands folded and his eyes on the floor.

Tancredi told him to go to the kitchen.

Remo went.

Now it was only the two of us and the grandfather clock, ticking in the dark.

I had spent the whole drive back deciding what to say to him.

I said none of it.

I said, "Friday."

His head tilted.

"They sentence him Friday," I said. "Fifteen years upstate. His lawyer read him the paper on Thursday."

"That's not possible."

"He told me himself."

"I said he stays in county."

"You texted it."

"I don't say things I haven't done."

I took one step toward the chair, and then another, until my knees nearly touched his.

"Then tell me what you did," I said.

Tancredi looked up at me.

His grey eyes are very pale in the dark, and for a moment there was nothing in them at all.

Then a muscle moved in his jaw.

"It's handled," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I have."

"Is he going upstate on Friday or not?"

"Go to bed, Sabina."

"I asked you a question."

"You asked." He stood.

He was a head taller than me, and he smelled of whiskey and cold air.

"You haven't asked me for anything in three days," he said. "I noticed."

I had not expected that.

I had thought he wasn't counting.

"I noticed every morning," he said. "You walked past my study door and you didn't knock. You didn't ask about the market or the church or your brother."

"And you decided I was finished."

"I decided you were learning."

"Learning what?"

He didn't answer that either.

He put two fingers under my chin and tipped my face up to the light from the window.

"Whatever you think you saw tonight," he said, "it's still my house."

I pulled my chin out of his hand.

"Then I'll ask you in your own house," I said. "Where is my brother going to be on Saturday?"

For one second, one, his hand closed on nothing.

I saw it.

He did not know.

Tancredi Falzone knew the name of every man who unloaded a truck for his family.

He did not know where my brother would be on Saturday.

Then his face went blank.

He took me by the elbow and walked me up the stairs.

His grip was not rough, and that was worse.

Remo was waiting at the top with a ring of keys.

He must have gone up the back way.

He would not look at me.

"Your door," Tancredi said.

I opened it.

I stood in the room where I had slept for three years, on the side of the bed by the wall.

"You're locking me in," I said.

"I'm keeping you where I know you are."

"For how long?"

"Until I understand what happened today."

"I'll tell you what happened. I stood up."

His eyes went to the bed, to the window, and back to me.

"You'll be comfortable," he said.

He shut the door.

The key turned, and I heard it twice.

I put my forehead against the wood and listened to them walk away.

Remo's footsteps went down the back stairs.

Tancredi's did not go far.

They stopped on the landing, where the phone sits in the wall niche.

Then I heard his voice, low, through the door.

"Yes, Zio."

A pause.

"Yes. I understand."

Another pause, a longer one.

"Yes, Zio."

I stood with my hand flat on the wood.

Three years in that house, and I had never once heard my husband say yes to anyone.

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