I Won't Bridge an Impossible Gap novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cheque on the Table
At the rehearsal dinner Ilaria offers Nina a cheque to disappear and Alessio says to let it go. Nina tears it up and leaves, and Ilaria takes his arm.
Fifty guests watched Ilaria Montanari slide a cheque across the dinner table to me.
It was the night before I married Don Alessio Ruffo at the town hall.
Two hours earlier she had knelt on his dressing room floor with pins in her mouth and fixed the hem of my dress.
"You can't marry with a crooked line, Nina," she'd said, and patted my knee.
I thanked her.
She had grown up in the villa next door to his, and she was the only one of his friends who had ever offered to sew me anything.
The rehearsal dinner was under the lemon trees in the villa courtyard, with a long table and candles in jars.
Alessio's captains sat on one side, the Montanari family on the other, and the old men of the council at the head.
I wore the dress I had altered myself, and the olive-wood ring Alessio had carved for me five years ago.
I had carved his, too.
We had made them in my kitchen the week he asked me, and he had laughed when I said I wanted nothing that cost money.
In five years I had not spent a cent of his.
I paid rent on my own little flat, I bought my own thread, and I took the bus.
Everyone at the table knew it, and half of them thought it was a trick.
Ilaria stood up with her glass and tapped it with a fork.
"To the bride who never asks for anything," she said.
The captains laughed.
She turned to me with a warm smile, and set the cheque on my plate.
"A wedding gift from my father and me, Nina. Two hundred thousand euros, in your name alone."
I looked at the number.
"Take it tonight," she said, still smiling. "Be honest with us once. Five years of nothing is a long way to walk for a bigger prize. Name the price, and we'll all be friends."
Nobody said a word.
Domenico Montanari, her father, folded his napkin.
I turned to find Alessio.
His chair was empty.
He had stepped into the hall twenty minutes before to take a call from the docks.
I carried the cheque out of the courtyard in my fist.
He was standing by the stairs with the phone against his chest, one hand over the speaker.
"Alessio. Did you see what she did?"
"I heard." He rubbed his eyebrow, right over the old scar. "Nina, let it go."
I stared at him.
"She put a price on me in front of your whole council."
"It's one night. Tomorrow it's over and nobody cares what Ilaria says."
"You told me that at our engagement dinner."
"Nina."
"You said it at your birthday. You said it at the christening."
"I'm on with the docks," he said, and he lifted the phone back to his ear.
He turned his back on me.
I stood there with the cheque in my hand and I thought, five years.
Then I thought, he is not going to say it to her.
So I walked back into the courtyard.
The candles were still burning.
Fifty faces were turned toward me, waiting for the gold digger to take her money.
I tore the cheque in half and then in half again.
I laid the pieces on Ilaria's plate, on top of her roast lamb.
I took the olive-wood ring off my finger and set it in the middle of the table next to the bread.
"Tell Alessio I let it go," I said.
Ilaria's smile did not move.
Domenico smiled, too.
I went up the back stairs to the guest room where I had slept all week.
I had brought very little.
My mother's rosary, my winter coats, my sewing shears, and the same battered suitcase I had carried out of the slums.
I took the coats out and laid them in the bottom of the case, and under them, folded flat, I put the old brown leather wallet with the cracked clasp.
It had been empty for five years.
I had never carried it anywhere, and I had never thrown it away.
I left the engagement bracelet, the villa keys and the phone he had bought me on the dresser.
I did not touch the dress.
At the bottom of the stairs, the housekeeper was waiting with her hands twisted in her apron.
"Signorina, let me call him."
"He knows where I am," I said. "He is thirty feet from here."
She opened the kitchen door for me.
I walked down the gravel drive, dragging the case behind me, and the stones were loud in the dark.
Nobody ran after me.
At the iron gate I looked back at the house.
The courtyard doors stood open, and the candles glowed through the lemon leaves.
Alessio had come out into the light.
He was looking at the ring on the table, and he did not look toward the gate.
Ilaria stepped up to him and slid her arm through his.
He let her.
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