They Left Me to Die, So I Came Home Undefeated novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Old Room

Mirella meets her father and her twin and finds her bedroom turned into a closet; she refuses to sign a paper, and Nonno asks for a letter her father says he burned.

I got into the long car because Cosima held the door open and cried.

My father sat in the front passenger seat with his back to me.

He didn't turn around.

I looked at the back of his gray head for the length of the bridge, and he looked at the road.

"Mirella," Cosima said. She took my hand in both of hers. "You're so thin. Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Papà wouldn't tell me where you were. I'd have come for you myself."

"That's not true," I said.

She went on holding my hand.

Her fingers were warm, and her nails were done in pale pink.

"I know why you're angry," she said.

"Do you?"

"Yes. And you're right."

My father spoke for the first time.

"We'll talk at the house."

His voice was the same.

Quiet and level, with nothing in it.

I had heard it in my sleep for five years.

The Montanari house stood behind a stone wall at the top of a hill, with the dock cranes lit red in the distance.

The gate opened for the car.

Under the porch light, the whole household stood in two lines on the steps.

Cooks, drivers, maids and guards, forty people in the cold at one in the morning.

Cosima had arranged it.

I could tell from the way she stepped out first and turned to hold her hand out to me.

I did not take it.

I walked up the front steps on my own.

My father stopped at the top of them, and the lines went still.

"This is my daughter," he said. "Mirella Montanari."

He said it to the servants, not to me.

It was the name I had asked for, and he gave it to me in front of forty people who had watched me thrown out.

Somebody in the line drew a sharp breath.

"Thank you," I said. "Papà."

He went in ahead of me without answering.

Cosima showed me through the house herself.

The marble hall, the portraits, the long table where we had eaten every Sunday of my childhood.

"We kept your seat," she said.

"Which one?"

She waved at the end of the table, where there was no chair at all.

"We had to move things around," she said. "I'm so sorry."

I looked at the empty place for a moment.

"Where do I sleep?"

Cosima's face fell.

"I wanted to give you your old room, truly. But after you left, Papà said it was a waste. It's a dressing room now. My dresses are in there."

"All of them?"

"I'm so sorry. We didn't know you'd come tonight."

My father came out of his study at the end of the hall and stopped in the doorway.

"The apartment over the garage," he said. "It has a bed."

"Fine," I said.

I did not cry, and I did not let my face move.

He held the study door open.

"Come in. There's one thing to sign."

On his desk lay a single page and a gold pen.

He had set them out before I arrived.

I picked up the page.

"Your name," he said. "I'll have it changed back tonight, as you asked. The lawyer needs your signature."

I read the first line.

It said that the undersigned, Mirella Rosso, requested that her surname be restored to Montanari.

I read the second.

It was longer than the first, and I got through half of it before he spoke.

"Sign it, please."

"I'm reading."

"It's a form."

"Then it'll keep until morning."

Cosima stood in the doorway behind me.

She didn't say anything, and her hands had stopped moving.

My father took the pen out of the stand and held it out.

"Mirella."

"No," I said. "I'll read it in daylight."

He studied me for a long moment.

I saw something in his face I hadn't expected.

It was not anger.

He was working something out, and he didn't like the answer.

"As you like," he said, and put the pen down.

I went to the door.

The nurse was standing in the hall in her gray uniform, with her hands folded.

"Miss," she said, very low. "Your grandfather is awake. He's been asking for you since Saturday."

"At this hour?"

"He doesn't sleep. Please."

My father said nothing, and I followed her up the stairs.

The room at the top smelled of medicine and old tobacco.

My grandfather lay propped on three pillows, very thin, with a hospital line taped to the back of his hand.

His eyes were still black.

"Little wolf," he said.

Nobody had called me that since I was a child.

I sat down on the edge of his bed.

"Nonno."

He put his dry hand on my wrist, over the place where the tag used to be.

"Your mother wrote you a letter," he said. "She gave it to me the week before she died. For your eighteenth birthday."

I wanted that letter more than I had wanted anything in five years.

"I gave it to your father to hold for you. I trusted him."

"Where is it?"

"Ask him," the old man said.

I turned my head.

My father stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.

"Papà," I said. "Where is the letter?"

He did not blink.

"I burned it," he said. "Years ago."

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