The Godfather's Heartbroken Lover novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Palermo

Four tiers of bee-sting cake had sat in the church hall all Saturday night, and nobody had cut them.

On Tuesday afternoon I boxed the top tier, the one that wasn't crushed, and walked it to the Valente house on Seventy-Ninth Street.

Elettra's mother opened the door.

She was small and grey-haired, with Elettra's dark eyes, and she looked at the cake box and then at me.

"You're the baker," she said.

"I'm the baker."

"She's upstairs. She's leaving." Her mouth trembled. "Take the cake up. Maybe she'll eat something."

Elettra's bedroom still had her high school trophies on a shelf.

She was kneeling on the floor in jeans and a man's sweater, with her black hair tied up in a towel and two open suitcases in front of her.

The white dress was in a heap in the corner.

She looked up at me.

"Did you bring a knife?"

"I brought cake."

"Same thing, in this neighborhood."

I sat on the end of her childhood bed with the box on my knees.

"Where are you going?"

"Palermo." She folded a sweater badly and threw it in. "Don't look at me like that. Not to stay. I'm going to go stand in my aunt's bathroom. And then I'm going to get on a plane I bought myself, to wherever I want."

"That's a terrible plan."

"It's the first plan in ten years that's mine." She sat back on her heels. "Annunziata's lawyer called this morning. She wants her four hundred thousand back."

"Is she going to get it?"

"Luca called her lawyer an hour later. He told him the debt was paid in full by the family, and if anyone in the family ever mentioned it again, they could take it up with him." She shrugged. "So, no."

I didn't say anything.

She picked at a thread on the sweater.

"I owe you something," she said. "I've been trying to work out how to say it without sounding like a greeting card."

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