The Pawn novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Whose Daughter

Nobody moved.

Cosimo stood with his back to the car, his shirt half open, one hand still on my hip.

I felt his fingers go tight.

"Don't," he said to Pellegrino, very low.

"She asked, and you promised her morning," Pellegrino said. "It is afternoon."

"Not like this."

"There was never going to be a good way, my boy."

I pushed away from the car.

My legs shook, and I held on to the roof until they stopped.

I did up the front of my dress with fingers that would not work.

"Somebody say it," I said. "Right now. One of you."

Pellegrino came down the last few steps of the ramp.

He stopped ten feet from me and held his hands where I could see them.

He looked old and tired, and his eyes were full.

"Nerina," he said. "I am your father."

The garage was so quiet I heard a car horn in the street, far below.

"No."

"Your mother was nineteen, and I was thirty-three, and I was already who I am. She did not know it when she met me. When she found out, she was carrying you."

"No."

"She ran in the night, and I spent twenty-five years looking for her." His voice caught. "I found her stone in a Chicago cemetery ten years ago, and I found you in a kitchen on Taylor Street six months back. I could not touch you. A man like me cannot walk into a bakery and say, forgive me, I am yours."

"You're lying."

"Look at the photograph."

"I looked at it."

"Look at your hands."

I looked down.

I had my mother's hands, long fingers and square nails, and a small crooked scar across the knuckle of one thumb.

Pellegrino held up his own.

The same long fingers.

The same square nails.

Something cold went down through me from the top of my head.

"That doesn't prove it," I whispered.

"No. It does not. There is a doctor and a test, and you can have one tomorrow, with any lab you like." He took a breath. "But you already know."

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