Chapter 14
arched a brow. “What’s the matter? You fed me fertility-suppressing poison for three years so I’d
lever carry your child. Now that we’re separated, am I not even allowed to have a baby with
someone else?”
You really are something, Ermanno.”
The shock hit him like a physical blow, and he stumbled half a step back. The color left his face
n a way I had never seen before – not anger-white, not cold-white, but the gray of a man
watching the ground open beneath him. “You… you knew about the poison too…”
‘No, it’s not what you think. I can explain-”
Before he could finish, I bent down, scooped Domenico into my arms – his small body warm
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–
and
and solid against my chest, his fingers curling instinctively into the collar of my dress walked past Ermanno without another glance. I felt his presence behind me like heat from an open furnace, but I did not turn. I pressed my thumb against the bare place on my ring finger and
kept walking.
–
He followed me all the way back to my house a narrow shotgun cottage at the end of a quiet
street lined with live oaks, the kind of place a Don’s wife was never supposed to live and a Don
was never supposed to find. I slammed the door shut and left him standing outside on the porch,
the paint peeling around him, the evening light catching the scar on his jaw.
He didn’t shout. Didn’t cause a scene. He didn’t send for soldiers or call in a local crew to take
the door off its hinges, which was well within his power and well within his character. He simply
sat down on the top step of the porch and waited, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, like
a man in a church he no longer believed in.
–
Every time I stepped out to walk Domenico to the baker’s, to check the mail, to sit on the back
steps where I wouldn’t have to see him – there he was. He would hold out small offerings from
time to time, the way a man leaves flowers at a grave, not expecting the dead to reach back.
Sometimes a little pastry from the bakery down the street, wrapped in wax paper. Sometimes a
tiny piece of clothing for a child- a knitted cap, a pair of soft leather shoes no bigger than my
palm chosen with a care that made my chest tighten in a way I refused to examine.
–
“Where is the child’s father?” He asked it carefully, like a man testing thin ice with the toe of a
shoe that cost more than this house.
“Dead.”
A flicker of barely concealed relief crossed his face – just a breath, just a fraction of a second
before he composed himself, his tone solemn and steady, the voice he used when he wanted
someone to believe he was being honest. “Gioia, come back with me. I’ll raise this child as my
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own flesh and blood.”
shoved his hand away hard, hard enough that his knuckles cracked against the porch railing,
and left him with two cold words: “Don’t bother.”
