He Denied Our Daughter, Now He Begs for Us novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Let Them See Her

The council met in the back room of a social club on Atwells Avenue, at a table long enough for fourteen men.

I carried Daisy in on my shoulder and walked the whole length of it.

Nobody stood up.

Giacomo sat at the head in a charcoal suit, with the adviser on his right and the leather register shut in front of him.

Gianna's father sat halfway down the table.

Santo's driver had dropped me at the door and gone, because Santo had said a Rinaldi couldn't cross that threshold without an invitation.

I had no invitation.

I was Mrs. Ferraro, and I had a summons.

"Sit," Giacomo said.

"I'll stand."

He folded his hands. "Gentlemen, my wife left our home three days ago and took two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of Ferraro money with her. She's staying with a man who wants this chair. I'd like the table to hear her explain it."

A murmur ran down both sides.

"It was a cashier's check," I said. "Made out to me. Your lawyer put it in my hand in a hospital room."

"A gift, conditional on a signature."

"The check says nothing about a signature."

I set the bank receipt on the table and slid it toward the adviser.

Then I laid the green ledger beside it, open to the last week of December five years ago.

"Every creditor who stood outside our door that Christmas Eve is on this page," I said. "I paid each one. I sold my mother's bracelet. I closed my studio. I emptied my savings. The total was a hundred and forty thousand dollars."

I looked down the table at the men I'd served at dinner for six years.

"Giacomo paid me back nothing. This check is the debt with five years of interest, to the cent. I took what I'm owed. I took nothing that was ever Ferraro money."

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