My Don Faked His Death to Test Me, So I Died Haunting Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Only Sober Guest

Rosalia's ghost reaches the castle dinner where the men toast the test, and notices Gemma's maid watching the clock while a text arrives from an empty wing.

The castle across the river was lit in every window when I got there.

I did not remember crossing the water.

I only remembered wanting to be where my husband was, and then I was in the dining room doorway.

My body was still on the floor of the great hall.

I knew exactly where it lay.

Alessio bought this castle in my name before we married.

He promised me a wedding in a place that belonged to me, and he kept that promise.

Tonight there were candles down the long table and a roast on the platter.

Alessio sat at the head with his jacket off.

My father sat on his right, and my two brothers sat beside him.

Gemma Colombo sat on his left with a glass of red wine in her hand.

She was twenty-nine and she wore white.

She had been living in my house for a year.

"You have all spoiled me rotten," Gemma said. "Alessio, Tullio, both of you boys. A girl could get used to this."

"You are our guest," my father said, and he raised his glass to her.

"To the test," my older brother said. "Two hours down, and not a single phone call."

They drank.

I stood in the middle of the room and screamed.

I screamed my mother's name and my daughter's name.

I screamed at my father to look at me.

Nobody turned a head, and the candles did not even flicker.

I walked straight through the table to Alessio's chair and put my hand on his face.

My hand went into him and came out the other side.

Gemma laughed at something and set her glass down.

"Won't your Donna come after me when she finds out?" she asked. "She will want my head on a plate."

"Rosalia?" Alessio smiled and shook his head. "She has not raised her voice at anyone in seven years."

"She will be angry at me, not you."

"She will be angry at nobody," my younger brother said. "She will bake a cake and ask how our day was."

My father laughed so hard he had to put his glass down.

I was the cake woman, the one who never raised her voice.

Not one of them said Mina's name.

She was four, and she had asked her father to read her the picture book with the red fox.

He had told her tomorrow.

A maid came around the table with a bottle.

She was small and plain, in a gray dress, with her brown hair pinned flat to her head.

I had seen her in my house a hundred times and never learned her name.

She was Gemma's maid.

She filled my father's glass first, then my brothers', then Alessio's.

She filled Gemma's last, and her hands were very steady.

She did not look at any of them.

Her eyes went to the clock over the fireplace.

Then she took the phone from her apron pocket and read the screen under the edge of the table.

I had spent seven years in a house full of soldiers.

I knew what a person looked like when she was waiting for a signal.

She put the phone away.

Alessio's own phone lit up on the tablecloth beside his plate.

He read it, and some of the tension left his shoulders.

"Is that the estate?" Gemma asked, leaning across.

"The soldier on the gate," Alessio said. "He wrote: All quiet."

"See? Nothing but good behavior."

My father laughed again, and my brothers laughed with him.

I looked at the phone in Alessio's hand.

The number on the screen was not the gate soldier's.

It was the house line in the servants' wing, and the servants' wing had been empty since noon.

I turned to the maid by the door.

She stood with her hands folded, and she was the only person in the room who was not smiling.

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