Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: Section Twelve
At midnight on the fifth of January I found my husband standing at my father's grave.
The cemetery gate was locked, and he had gone over the wall.
I could tell from the mud on his good coat, and I went over after him.
Section twelve lay silent under the cypresses, with the last chrysanthemums rotted brown on every stone.
Ange Santoni's stone had white lilies against it, fresh.
Antone stood in front of it with his hands at his sides.
He was not kneeling.
His head was bare and the frost lay on his shoulders, and I saw that he had been standing there a long time.
"I came to practice," he said, without turning round. "For tomorrow. I thought if I said it to him first, with no one listening, I would not fail it."
"And did you say it?"
"I got as far as his name."
I stood beside him and took his cold hand in mine.
"Not tonight," I said.
"Vannina..."
"Not tonight, and not alone. It isn't for the dark. You'll say it where they can hear you."
He looked at the stone.
"He would have hated the fuss," I said. "Come home."
For a long moment he did not move.
Then he lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed the knuckles, and we climbed back over the wall together.
We did not speak on the stair streets.
He opened the front door of the house and took me past the hall, past the navy coat and up the second flight, to the room at the end of the corridor.
It was his room.
I had never been inside it.
It was bare and clean, with a tall window over the old port and a wide bed made up in gray linen, and a single book on the night table.
"This is yours," I said, from the door. "So I haven't broken anything."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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