The Don's Wife Was Never Weak novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Sunday Lunch

Talia tears up the forged pier transfer at the Sabatini table, and Cordelia stands to announce she's carrying Renzo's child.

"Show me," I said through the glass.

Renzo snapped his fingers.

One of the soldiers brought a folder from the car.

Renzo held a page flat against the window so I could read it under the streetlight.

It was a transfer of the Red Hook pier lease from the Conforti trust to Sabatini Holdings.

At the bottom was my signature.

It was a good signature.

It had the little loop I put in the T, the one my father used to tease me about.

I had never seen that page in my life.

"Cordelia handled the paperwork," Renzo said. "You were there. You just don't listen in meetings."

"I wasn't allowed in the meetings."

He folded the page and pushed it through the mail slot.

It landed on the mat by my bare feet.

"Keep it," he said. "Sunday lunch is at one. Be there, and wear the ring."

He walked back to his car.

The soldiers got in after him.

The taillights went red at the corner and disappeared.

My mother moved up behind me.

"That's your hand," she said.

"It's a copy of my hand."

Gianni was still watching the street.

"She practiced," he said quietly. "In the car. I saw her with a notepad once and thought she was doodling."

I didn't sleep.

At six my mother was downstairs shaping the Sunday bread.

I was at her desk in the back with my father's old box of papers.

His will was there, in a brown envelope with his handwriting on the front.

I already knew what it said.

I read it again anyway.

The pier lease belonged to the Conforti trust.

Only a Conforti by blood could sign for the trust.

A Sabatini signature meant nothing, and a married name meant nothing.

My father had written it that way the year I was engaged.

At the time I'd thought he was being an old man.

I put the envelope in my bag.

At twelve fifty I walked up the front steps of the house on Todt Hill.

Gianni waited at the bottom of the drive in his car.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "Then I come in."

"Give me thirty."

The soldier at the door didn't know whether to stop me.

I walked past him while he was deciding.

The dining room smelled of gravy and roast pork.

Twenty-two people sat around the long table, Renzo's mother at the foot, the captains and their wives along the sides.

Renzo sat at the head.

Cordelia sat on his right, in my place again, in a cream sweater with her hair tucked behind one ear.

There was no plate set for me.

Renzo set down his fork.

"You're late," he said. "And you're not wearing the ring."

"I brought something else."

I took my father's will out of the envelope and laid it beside his plate.

"Read the third page," I said.

He didn't touch it.

Renzo's mother did.

She got up from the foot of the table, walked the length of it, and picked it up.

She was sixty-three and had buried a Don, and nobody at that table told her to sit down.

She read the third page out loud.

"Only a Conforti by blood may sign for the trust."

The room went quiet.

"So the transfer is paper," I said. "Somebody forged my name onto a page that couldn't have worked even if I'd signed it."

I took the page he'd pushed through my mother's mail slot out of my bag.

I tore it in half.

Then I tore it again and let the pieces fall onto Cordelia's plate, on top of her untouched pork.

Cordelia didn't flinch.

She dabbed her lips with her napkin.

"Renzo," she said, "I told you she'd be emotional."

"I'm not emotional. I'm right."

"You're in his house uninvited."

"It was my house on Friday."

One of the captain's wives made a sound into her wine that might have been a laugh.

Renzo's face had gone dark red above his beard.

He was looking at the torn paper, not at me.

"Who prepared this?" he asked Cordelia quietly.

For one second I thought he might actually see it.

Cordelia put her hand flat on her stomach.

She pushed her chair back and stood.

She looked down the table at every wife and every captain, and she smiled at Renzo's mother last.

"I wanted to wait until after dessert," she said. "But since Talia insists on making today about her."

She took Renzo's hand and pressed it against the front of her cream sweater.

"I'm pregnant," she said. "It's Renzo's. The Sabatini family is finally getting an heir."

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