Chapter 2 - THE MAN SHE HAD COME TO HATE
Nell shoved her chair back.
“My name is Nell.”
Carmine stood.
She flinched before she could stop herself.
He noticed.
So did Vittorio.
“Everyone out,” Carmine said.
Nobody moved until he looked up.
“Now.”
Chairs scraped. Conversations started in frightened whispers. Within seconds, the dining room emptied.
Vittorio remained.
“This is cruel,” he said. “Your daughter died sixteen years ago.”
“Leave.”
“I buried an empty coffin with you.”
“Then you remember it was empty.”
The door closed behind him.
Nell watched the nearest exit.
Carmine stayed on the other side of the table.
“What happened to your hand?”
“A broken glass.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You remember.”
She hated the certainty in his voice.
She hated that some small, buried part of her remembered it telling her that thunder couldn’t get inside the house.
He opened his wallet.
Inside was a faded photograph of a woman holding a little girl on her hip.
Rose had flour on her cheek.
The girl was missing a front tooth.
Nell looked away too late.
Carmine’s breath caught.
“Elena.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Where have you been?”
“Alive. Sorry to disappoint you.”
He looked as if she had struck him.
“I searched for you.”
“My mother said you would.”
“For sixteen years.”
“She said that, too.”
He gripped the chair in front of him.
“Rose told you to hide from me?”
Nell laughed once.
It sounded ugly in the quiet room.
“You’re good at this.”
“At what?”
“Looking hurt.”
For three years, she had imagined confronting him.
She had imagined laying her mother’s photograph on his desk and forcing him to say what he had done.
Instead, she was shaking beside a half-eaten pie.
Carmine reached toward her.
She stepped back.
“Touch me, and I scream.”
His hand dropped.
“All right.”
That answer unsettled her more than anger would have.
She moved toward the service door.
He didn’t block it.
But when she opened it, his voice followed her.
“What did she tell you I’d done?”
Nell turned.
“She told me you sent men to burn us alive.”
Carmine went perfectly still.
Then, slowly, he looked toward the door his brother had used.
Upstairs, Nell locked herself in her narrow room.
Her overnight bag waited beneath the bed.
She pulled it out.
A folded sheet of hotel stationery had been slipped through the zipper.
May you like
Six words were printed across it.
YOUR MOTHER SHOULD HAVE KEPT RUNNING.
