I Left the Underboss for the Man Who Remembered Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Nobody Told You

Gianna refuses to go back to Cesare in front of her cousin and the Orsini crews, then finds her father in intensive care and learns he has been asking for her all week.

The Orsini house in Bay Ridge had every light on.

A crowd of men stood in my father's front room, and every one of them stopped talking when I came in with a duffel bag.

My cousin sat in my father's leather chair.

He was thirty-six, soft around the middle, and he had been running my father's table for three weeks.

"Gianna." He didn't get up. "I heard. Come here, sit down."

"I'd rather stand."

"Cesare called me an hour ago. He's willing to forgive tonight." He spread his hands. "A bad scene at a party. People lose their tempers. You go back, you say you're sorry to the Greco girl, and Monday it's over."

"The Greco girl is pregnant by him."

Nobody in the room moved.

My cousin rubbed his face.

"Then even more reason. Think about what a baby does to that table, Gianna. The Falcones need us quiet."

"Us," I said.

"The Family."

"Whose Family? Is the alliance going to ask me to forgive her every year?"

"You'd have a good life."

"I'd have the card that says guest."

One of the older captains coughed into his fist.

I turned around and looked at all of them, the men my father had fed, bailed out and buried for.

I said, "I didn't leave tonight because he forgot a cake. I left because he fed it to her in front of two hundred people, and nobody at that table stopped him."

"That's not what happened," my cousin said.

"Ask Ettore. He was at the door."

Ettore stood behind me by the entrance, with his hands folded in front of him.

He said, "She's telling it right."

My cousin stared at him.

"Nobody asked you, Bruni."

"She did."

The old captain nodded slowly.

Another one, by the window, said, "The captain's boy at the Marlowe says the same."

I could see the room tilt, the way it does when men decide they like how a woman said no.

My cousin saw it too.

He stood up out of my father's chair.

"You walk out on the Falcones and you leave this Family with no allies and no money. Think about that before you start making speeches."

"I'm not making a speech. I'm telling you I won't go back."

"Then where will you sleep?"

"At my father's house," I said. "I'm his daughter."

He opened his mouth and closed it.

I picked up the duffel bag and carried it up the stairs to the room I'd slept in until I was twenty.

Nobody stopped me.

In the morning my bed still had my old quilt, and somebody had set a plate of cold eggs on the dresser.

I ate them standing up.

Ettore knocked at nine.

He had his coat on and his keys in his hand.

"Your father's awake," he said. "The nurse called. He asked for you."

"He wrote me last night and said to come."

"I know. I'm the one who gave the nurse your address."

"You did?"

"She asked where to send it. I told her to hand it to the doorman herself. I thought that was safer than the mail."

I looked at him.

"Why does everyone in this house tell me things by accident?"

Ettore almost smiled.

"Nobody does it by accident."

The hospital was in Sunset Park, on the third floor, in a room with a window that looked at a brick wall.

My father was smaller than I remembered.

He lay with his eyes closed, a clip on his finger, a white stubble across his jaw.

The nurse at the foot of his bed was a heavy woman in blue scrubs.

She looked at me for a long time.

"You're the daughter."

"Yes."

"Nobody told you he was in intensive care. The Falcone people said it was a minor thing and he needed his rest."

"I was told it was a check-up."

She shook her head.

"He's asked for you every day this week," she said. "And every day he asks, he says nobody tells you he asks."

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