The Godfather's Heartbroken Lover novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring
At his birthday dinner, the godfather Klara has loved for five years puts the ruby ring she thought was hers on his returning first love, and Klara walks out in front of eighty guests; at the gate his mother texts that Klara's bakery is now the bride's present.
For five years I believed Luca Corvino loved me, and on his birthday he put my ring on another woman's finger.
A week before, I found it in his desk.
I was looking for stamps.
It was an old oval ruby in a gold setting, his grandmother's, and I had seen it once in a photo on his mother's piano.
I closed the drawer and sat on the floor of his study and cried.
Five years, and he had never said the word.
He bought me a diamond necklace on our first anniversary.
He gave me a key to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
He came into the bakery where I worked every morning for a month just to buy the last slice of my mother's bee-sting cake.
But he never said it.
I told myself the ring was how Luca said it.
So on Saturday night I wore green silk and the diamond necklace, and I walked into his mother's house on Shore Road.
The garden room was one long table under glass.
Eighty people. Captains and their wives. Old men who kissed Luca's cheek.
His mother sat at the far end in black and pearls.
Annunziata Corvino had called me "the baker's girl" for five years, always with a smile, always in front of someone.
"The baker's girl looks almost elegant tonight," she said as I sat down.
I sat where I always sat, at Luca's right hand.
He touched my knee under the table.
His other hand kept going to his jacket pocket.
I knew what was in it.
Dora leaned across from my other side and whispered, "If he does it during the antipasto, I'm going to cry into the burrata."
"He's not doing anything," I whispered back.
I was smiling so hard my face hurt.
Then the door at the end of the room opened.
A woman stood there in a black dress, with long black hair and a red mouth.
The room went quiet in a way I had never heard eighty Corvinos go quiet.
Luca's hand left my knee.
Annunziata stood up.
"Look who's home," she said.
Dora's fork hit her plate.
"Oh, no," she breathed. "No, no, no."
"Who is that?" I asked.
Dora didn't answer.
Luca did, without looking at me.
"Elettra."
He said her name the way I had waited five years to hear him say mine.
I knew the name.
Everyone in Bay Ridge knew the name.
The girl he was supposed to marry, ten years ago, before she vanished.
Annunziata held out both hands to her.
Then she turned to a waiter.
"Set a place for Signorina Valente. At my son's right."
My chair.
The waiter looked at me.
Eighty people looked at me.
I looked at Luca.
He stood up and walked down the length of the table to her.
He didn't look back once.
"Klara," he said over his shoulder. "Find yourself another seat."
Someone laughed behind a napkin.
I stood up because I couldn't think of anything else to do.
I moved to the end of the table, next to a captain's wife who wouldn't meet my eyes.
Elettra sat in my chair.
Luca stayed standing behind her.
He took his hand out of his jacket pocket.
The ruby caught the candlelight.
"Ten years late," he said to her, so everyone could hear.
He put my ring on her finger.
The room exploded into applause.
Annunziata cried.
Dora didn't clap.
Neither did I.
I sat there with my hands in my lap while eighty people toasted the future Signora Corvino.
After the cake, Luca found me in the hall outside the powder room.
He looked tired.
He didn't look sorry.
"Don't make a face," he said. "I didn't know she was coming tonight."
"You had the ring in your pocket."
"I've had it in my pocket for a month."
I waited for him to say it was meant for me.
He didn't.
"Her family needs the name. My mother needs the wedding. It's the family, Klara. You understand the family."
"And me?"
He took my face in his hand like he always did.
"Nothing has to change. She needs the name. You have me."
"In the apartment."
"In the apartment."
"While she wears your grandmother's ring."
His thumb moved along my jaw.
"You've always known what I am."
I had.
I just hadn't known what I was.
I went back into the garden room.
The talking dropped off table by table.
I walked the whole length of it to where Luca was sitting again, beside Elettra, in my chair.
I reached behind my neck and undid the clasp.
The diamond drop slid off my throat into my palm.
I laid it on his plate, in the last of his birthday cake.
"Five years," I said. "Happy birthday, Luca."
Then I walked out.
Nobody stopped me.
Nobody ever stops the baker's girl.
At the apartment I packed one suitcase and found my passport.
Dora was double-parked outside in her old white Jeep with the hazards on.
"Get in," she said. "Where are we going?"
"JFK."
"And then?"
"Berlin. My aunt."
She drove like she wanted to hit something.
At the gate, my phone buzzed.
It was a photo from Annunziata.
Elettra at the long table, laughing, holding up a ring of keys.
My keys.
The keys to my bakery on Court Street, the one I built with every dollar I'd saved and my mother's life insurance.
"The lease is in my name, cara," Annunziata wrote. "Her engagement present."
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