Chapter 5
Mia learned about the baby in the car outside St. Anthony's.
Natalie had wanted Luca to tell her.
Luca had wanted to wait until he could control the room.
Serena solved the disagreement by appearing at Sunday brunch with a hospital bracelet still around her wrist.
"Is the baby Dad's?" Mia asked.
Natalie kept both hands around the steering wheel. "Yes."
"Did you know?"
"Not until this week."
Mia looked through the windshield at Luca standing beside the church doors.
Serena was next to him in a pale coat, one hand resting low over her stomach.
"Are you mad at the baby?"
"No. Babies don't make adult choices."
"Are you mad at Serena?"
Natalie considered the answer Mia deserved. "I am hurt by choices Serena and your father made. That doesn't mean you have to be rude to her."
"What if she's nice to me?"
"Then you can be nice back. You never have to be cruel to prove you love me."
Mia absorbed that while worrying the zipper on her coat.
"Are you and Dad getting divorced?"
"I don't know what happens next. I do know none of it is your fault, and nobody is asking you to choose today."
"Today?"
Natalie almost smiled. "Nobody is asking you to choose. Period."
Inside the parish hall, Father Thomas praised the Moretti family's charity while half the room watched Serena's hospital band.
An older woman finally asked if she was all right.
Serena glanced at Luca. "We had a scare."
The room changed.
Luca could have denied it.
Instead, he stepped beside Serena.
"The child is mine," he said.
Whispers moved from table to table.
Several men immediately began calculating what another Moretti child might mean.
Their wives looked at Natalie.
Mia looked only at her father.
"Is it a boy or a girl?"
"We don't know yet," Luca said.
"Will it live at our house?"
Serena opened her mouth.
Luca answered first.
"The baby will have a home. You will always have yours."
It was a careful answer, and Mia noticed.
"That's not what I asked."
Luca's mouth shifted as if he almost smiled despite the room. "No. Not right now."
Mia nodded.
Then she turned to Serena.
"Does the baby like pizza?"
Serena blinked. "At the moment, the baby likes crackers and hates coffee."
"That's sad."
A few women laughed softly.
The tension broke without disappearing.
Serena looked at Natalie over Mia's head.
For once there was no victory in her expression, only uncertainty.
Later, while Mia helped arrange raffle tickets, Father Thomas approached Natalie.
"You do not have to decide your whole life in one week," he said.
"Everyone else seems to have decided it for me."
"Then disappoint them. Take your time."
Across the room, Luca cut a piece of coffee cake for Mia and removed the walnuts because he remembered she disliked them.
Serena passed her a napkin.
The three of them looked, from a distance, almost ordinary.
The sight hurt in a way public cruelty would not have.
Mia could like Serena.
Luca could love both children.
None of that restored the marriage.
Mrs. Bell, whose husband ran one of Luca's warehouses, stopped beside Natalie with a paper plate in her hand.
She opened her mouth, glanced toward Mia, and changed whatever she had meant to say.
"If you need anything," she said instead.
"Thank you." Natalie did not rescue her from the awkwardness.
Sympathy was another way St. Rosa counted power, and half the room was waiting to see whether she would accept it like a widow.
Across the hall, Luca met Natalie's eyes over Mia's head.
He did not look ashamed.
He looked watchful.
That was the man she knew: even after breaking a promise, he measured the room for the cost.
Mia won a plastic whistle at the raffle table and immediately blew it once.
Father Thomas covered both ears.
Serena laughed before she could stop herself, and Mia laughed because Serena had.
The sound hurt Natalie, but she let it happen.
Her daughter was allowed one ordinary Sunday, even if every adult around her had made it complicated.
Mia returned from the raffle table with two strips of tickets and a paper cup of lemonade.
"Dad says the baby can come to my games someday," she said. "If it doesn't cry the whole time."
"Babies rarely accept conditions," Natalie said.
Mia leaned against her arm. "I think I want a sister. But I don't want her to get my room."
"You can want both things."
"Is that another adult answer?"
"It's a mother answer."
Mia accepted that and hurried back toward the raffle table.
Dom waited until she was out of hearing range.
"Frank says four of your father's old men will meet," he said. "Three haven't answered."
"Midnight. The Black Swan."
"Do I tell the men to leave their Moretti posts?"
"No."
Dom frowned. "Move the guns?"
"No."
"Then what do you want them to do?"
Natalie looked across the parish hall.
Luca was holding Mia's raffle tickets while Serena stood beside him, one hand resting over the child he had just claimed in front of St. Rosa.
"Tomorrow morning," Natalie said, "every Caruso man goes back to work."
"For Luca?"