Why Cry When You Made Me Leave? novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Garage
Tancredi corners Ema in the garage and admits he forged her adoption; she gives back the ring and walks out past the men, and a stranger in a black car calls her Miss Sabbadin.
My ex-fiance, Tancredi Brandolini, stared at me.
He had me against the wall of the Cardinale garage, one hand flat beside my head.
His eyes were bloodshot, and his voice came out in pieces.
"How did you get like this, Emanuela?"
"You used to fight me over a late dinner."
"Now Fiorella tells you she's in love with me, and you say okay."
I looked at the line of black cars behind him.
Nine days ago I was the girl whose name was painted on the door of the third car.
Now the door said nothing.
"Okay is what you wanted," I said.
"No."
He slammed his palm into the concrete, and I didn't flinch.
"You were supposed to scream at me."
"You were supposed to come to me and beg."
"You were supposed to be the one who needed me."
I tilted my head and watched him.
That was when I understood he wasn't acting.
He wasn't sorry for what he had done to me.
He was furious that it hadn't worked.
Nine days ago a lab report landed on my father's desk.
It said I was no blood relation to Baldassare Cardinale, the Don of Brogary.
It came with adoption papers, stamped and notarized, naming me a foundling nobody wanted.
My father read it once and took my name away in front of the whole house.
My mother, Ines, looked at the carpet.
My sister, Fiorella, took every piece of jewelry from my room that same night, and I handed her the keys to the box.
She ruined my twenty-second birthday by announcing in front of three hundred guests that I had never been one of them.
I said nothing then either.
I had been waiting for one person to say the paper was wrong.
Nobody did.
"Tell me something, Tancredi," I said.
"Where did you get the lab?"
His jaw moved.
"What lab?"
"Dock Street," I said.
"The print shop above the pawnbroker."
"Our old driver carried the envelope there himself, three weeks before my birthday."
"He was too scared to tell anyone but me."
The color left his face all at once.
"He's lying."
"He's in a hospital bed with two broken ribs," I said.
"Somebody asked him to stop talking."
For three seconds the only sound was a truck backing out on Hill Street.
Then Tancredi laughed, a short ugly laugh, and let his hand fall.
"Fine," he said.
"Yes, I did it."
"You were going to your father with the dock books."
"I saw you in the office, Ema, with your little photographs."
"Four million doesn't sound like much to a girl who never counted."
"You gave me until the naming to put it back."
"I couldn't put it back."
I said nothing.
"So I made it so nobody would listen to you."
"A girl with no blood has no vote, no seat and no standing to read a ledger."
"But I was still going to marry you."
He said it.
"I wanted you small and in my bed, where you couldn't audit me and couldn't leave."
"That was the plan."
"Then Fiorella started following me around the house, and you stopped fighting."
"I didn't plan on you not fighting."
I felt something go very still and clear inside me.
I pulled the diamond off my finger.
It was a hard, cold stone, three carats, bought with money he had taken from my family.
I dropped it into the breast pocket of his suit.
"Take Fiorella," I said.
"She'll love paying for it."
He caught my wrist.
"You can't leave."
"Your father signed an order an hour ago."
"Every door in Brogary is shut to you until you put your name on the release he wrote."
"No hotel, no friend, no bank, no bed."
"Stay here with me, and I'll send her away."
I looked down at his hand until he let go.
Then I walked out through the front of the garage, into the yard, where thirty men stood smoking in the rain.
I didn't take the car.
I didn't take my coat.
I walked down the long gravel drive in the dress I had been wearing since morning, past the guards who wouldn't meet my eyes.
Behind me, a man said, "Don's orders, miss."
I kept walking.
At the iron gate a black car sat with its lights off and its engine running.
The back door opened.
A man leaned out into the rain, scarred through one eyebrow, with grey eyes that went over my face like he was counting something he had lost.
"Get in, Miss Sabbadin," he said.
I had never heard that name in my life.
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