Lethal Love novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: Nine Nights
"You kept it," I said.
"I kept it in my nightstand." He tucked the jacket higher over my shoulder.
"Why?"
"Because it's the only place you ever wrote to me as somebody else, and I liked you anyway."
I pressed the button on the side.
The screen stayed black.
"It's dead," I said.
"It's been dead since Christmas. I was sleeping."
I turned my head on his chest and looked at him.
He was already asleep, under the bulb we keep lit for burglars, with pins all over the floor.
In June the forty-button column stood in the bridal house window on Madison Avenue.
A small white card at its hem said Cregan.
I stood on the sidewalk at eight in the morning with a coffee and looked at it.
I didn't go in.
A girl of about twenty stopped beside me with her mother.
The girl put her hand flat on the glass, right over the buttons.
"That one," she said. "Mom. That one."
Her mother looked at the card.
"Cregan," she said. "That's the one from the video. The seamstress."
"Designer," the girl said.
I walked to the subway before either of them saw my face.
On Sunday Cosima's restaurant was closed to everybody but family.
There were more of us now.
The old capo came every week, and sat at Gran's left hand, and let her cut his meat.
The ladies came, because Gran said Thursday wasn't enough.
The barber came once and never left.
Dom tied the braciole.
Cosima stood at his elbow and said, "Too tight."
"Papa's way."
"Papa was wrong for thirty years."
He tied the next one looser.
She stared at it.
Then she turned around and walked out of the kitchen with her hand over her mouth.
Under the photo of Matty in his Mets cap, Dom poured a glass of red wine.
He set it at the empty place by the bar.
Nobody said anything about it.
Then one of the cousins' kids knocked it over with a breadstick, and Dom laughed so hard he had to put his fork down.
Cosima didn't count.
She told me afterward she'd stopped counting in March.
That night Gran kept us at the shop until ten, because she said Dom's hands were wasted on pasta.
She sat him at her old machine in the back with a pair of police uniform trousers.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Lethal Love are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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