They Left Me to Die, So I Came Home Undefeated novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Not His Name Anymore

The big guard did not move.

The scarred one took one step toward me and stopped.

"Did you hear me?" my father said.

"Yes, signore," the big man said.

"Then do it."

The big guard looked at the phone on the cloth.

He looked at the old man in the wheelchair.

"No," he said.

My father stared at him.

In eighteen years, I think, no one in that house had said the word to him.

"I carried that girl's bag to the bus once," the big guard said. "I was nineteen, and I was told it was a school trip. I didn't know what she'd done."

"She did nothing," Corrado said. "He did."

"I know that now."

The scarred man dropped his eyes.

One by one the staff along the wall, the drivers and the cooks and the men at the door, turned and looked at the head of the table.

None of them looked at my father.

A thin man in a driver's coat came through the pantry door.

He kept his hat in both hands.

"Signore Montanari," he said to the old man. "I am the driver Signore Gaspare told to sign a paper this morning."

"Yes?"

"I never saw anything. He paid me to say I saw Corrado with the manifest. He paid me three thousand dollars." The driver took a folded envelope out of his coat and laid it on the table, next to the phone. "That's the rest of it. I can't keep it."

Corrado's breath left him in a rush.

My father had not looked at the envelope.

He was looking at his father.

"Gaspare," the old man said.

"Papà."

"You took the book. You sold your own daughter's name. You taught your other daughter to lie, and you let your son carry a bus ticket for five years."

My father's jaw moved.

"I did what the family needed. The docks cannot pass to a girl who runs in a cage."

"The docks pass to the one my wife named. They have always passed to her."

My grandfather put both hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself up.

The nurse reached for him, and he waved her off.

He stood, swaying, in the light of the dining room, and the whole table stood with him.

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