The Don's Runaway Substitute novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lines Above the Cake
At the Sunday table Mara reads lines nobody else can see: she is only a stand-in and the real fiancée is coming home. She sets Vincenzo free, and he pulls her hard against his chest and asks who told her.
The guard at the front door of the lake house took my phone again that Sunday, the way he did every week.
"Family rule, Miss Lenzi," he said, and dropped it in a basket with forty others.
In three years nobody had taken a single picture of me at that house.
I had never asked why.
The Don's uncle pulled out my chair himself.
He was fifty-eight, and the one man in the family who always asked how I was sleeping.
"There she is," he said. "The girl who gets my nephew home for dinner."
He looked at my face a moment longer than anyone else had, then smiled and cut me the first slice of the cake.
Vincenzo sat at the head of the table, two seats down, with his phone face up beside his plate.
His sister leaned across the table and stole a candied cherry off my slice.
"You two are disgusting," she whispered. "He's been looking at you through the whole soup."
I laughed, and I believed her.
I had texted him twice since morning to ask where he was.
He had answered both within a minute, like always.
He was the Don of the Sandri family, and for three years he had let me ring him in the middle of a meeting just because I couldn't sleep.
I knew it was too much.
I took the cake anyway and looked at him, and he looked back.
Then words appeared in the air above my plate.
【The Don is running a family. Do you think he has time to tuck you in?】
I put my fork down.
Nobody else at the table looked up.
【She is only an ordinary woman he keeps because of her face.】
【The real fiancée is coming home from Europe. When she lands, this stand-in is finished.】
I stared at the lines until my eyes hurt.
Then I looked at Vincenzo.
He was cutting his meat and listening to his cousin, patient and calm.
All at once the patience looked different to me.
It wasn't love.
It was a man being kind to something he was going to put down.
Everyone knew about Allegra Pozzi, the woman he was promised to before me.
The family said she had gone abroad to study and would be back someday.
Nobody ever said the someday had come.
Fio asked me twice if I felt sick.
I told her it was the cake.
I said nothing else for the rest of dinner, and I did not look at Vincenzo again.
At the door Dario squeezed my shoulder and told me to sleep well.
In the car home Vincenzo put his hand on my knee, and I moved my knee away.
He glanced at me and said nothing.
At home the bedroom light was low, the way I had always begged him to leave it.
He took off his jacket and reached for me.
I stepped back.
"You didn't do anything wrong," I said.
"Then what is it?"
"I finally get it. I've held on to you too tight for three years."
His hands stopped.
"Mara."
"You don't have to check in with me anymore," I said. "Not your schedule, not your calls. Stay out as late as you want."
"I never minded."
"I know you didn't. That's why it's been so easy for me."
My voice was steady, which surprised me.
"If I stop hanging on, you won't have to sit through any of it when she comes back," I said. "I'll be gone before she lands."
I meant it kindly.
I thought it was the first generous thing I had ever done for him.
The room was very quiet.
"Who is she?" Vincenzo asked.
"Allegra. When Allegra comes home, I'll go quietly, and you can let me walk out the door."
I turned to leave.
He caught my wrist and pulled me against his chest, hard enough that the air left me.
His heart was pounding.
I had never once felt it pound.
"Say that again," he said into my hair. "The part about her coming home."
"Vincenzo, let go."
"I decided it on Tuesday. I told two men, in a locked room."
His arm tightened around my back.
"Nobody has said her name in this house for three years. Nobody told you."
I opened my mouth.
【Do not tell him about these lines.】
The words sat in the air between his shoulder and my face, and he could not see them.
"Who told you, Mara?" he asked.
I said nothing.
He let go of me slowly and held out his hand.
"Give me your phone."
The guard had handed it back to me at the door on our way out.
I put it in his palm, and he closed his fingers around it and put it in his pocket.
"Nobody leaves this house until I know," he said.
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