The Mafia Heir's Revenge Baby novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Boston
A month after the funeral, Gianni drove to Boston with one duffel bag and the chessboard off the milk crate.
Bess met him at the door of Amberlight Labs.
She had on her denim jacket with all the lab-safety pins.
She folded her arms and did not move out of the doorway.
"So," she said. "You're the dad."
"I'm the dad."
"You're the one who sat in a bar for three hours drinking club soda."
"Somebody told you that."
"Everybody told me that. Your aunts have my number now. I don't know how." She looked him up and down. "Come in. Don't touch anything with a hazard sticker."
He came in.
He didn't touch anything.
He stood in the middle of my lab with his hands in his pockets.
He looked at the clean benches and the white walls and the windows over the harbor.
Then he saw the back room.
The tank was still there.
I'd never been able to make myself take it apart.
Glass and tubing, dark now, with the amber light switched off.
He stood in front of it for a long time.
"That's it?" he said.
"That's it."
"He was in there."
"Nine months. I slept on a cot right there."
He put his hand flat on the glass, very gently.
Bess watched him do it from the doorway.
When he turned around, she was looking at the ceiling.
"Fine," she said, a little thickly. "He can stay. But I'm grilling him over lunch."
She grilled him over fries.
Archie's fries, at the picnic table on the roof, while Archie was still at school.
"What do you do now?" Bess said. "For money. Since you're not a gangster."
"I own a restaurant."
"The restaurant where they ran a mob out of the upstairs room."
"Not anymore. Now it's a restaurant."
"Who's running it while you're up here?"
"The cook. He's been there thirty years. He hated Carmine more than anybody."
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