Chapter 5
The Thursday dinner was held in the long room at the Cortese, forty-one people, and it was not a dinner. It was a headcount.
Sera came in on Rafe's arm, because that was the entire point of her being there. She wore what she'd been told to wear. She smiled at the Cardone men.
Livia sat two seats down on his other side.
Still wearing the ring.
They got through the soup. They got through the toasts.
Then Aldo Cardone put his glass down.
He was sixty-three. He'd buried a brother under the old man. And in four years he had never once said Sera's name correctly.
"So," Aldo said. "About Sunday."
The table went quiet in that specific way.
"My niece was in a Malara yard, and this family went and got her, and that's right. That's how it should be."
"It is," Rafe said.
"And then Sunday morning, at your own table, this one" and he didn't point, he tipped his chin at her, which was worse "tells the room she's walking out. In front of nine of my people."
"I heard about it within the hour," Rafe said.
"So did everybody." Aldo spread his hands. "So what do we do?"
There it was.
Sera had spent four days working out how it would come, and this was it. Cleaner than she'd guessed.
Aldo didn't want her punished. Aldo wanted to find out whether the Cardone side could make a Grieco do something in public.
Rafe knew that too. She could see him knowing it.
"What would satisfy you," Rafe said.
"She apologizes. To Livia. Here."
"For what?" Sera said.
"For opening your mouth about a ring that isn't your business."
"Uncle," Livia said.
"Stay out of it, sweetheart."
Sera looked down the table at Rafe.
And this was the part she'd think about for a long time afterward, because he didn't enjoy it.
That was the whole horror of it.
He sat there with his hand around a water glass and she watched him do the arithmetic. Forty-one people. Nine of them Cardone. The Malara business still open.
And she watched him get to the answer he had to get to.
"Sera," he said.
Just her name. Perfectly level.
"Say it," she said.
"Apologize to Livia."
"And?"
He didn't say the rest.
Aldo said it.
"On your knees would be traditional."
Somebody laughed, one short bark, and then stopped.
Sera stood up.
And then she did the arithmetic too.
Two hundred and six people. Her father in a bed at Ellencove with two Grieco men at the door. Nine days.
She had counted on being able to walk out of this room. She'd built the whole week on it. And standing there she understood that she couldn't, not tonight, not yet, and that everybody at this table had known it before she did.
"Sera." Her mother's voice, very low, very close to her ear. "It's four seconds."
And Rosalind Caravella put a hand on her daughter's shoulder and pressed down.
She didn't press hard.
She didn't have to.
Sera knelt.
The floor at the Cortese was marble and it was cold through her dress, and the room made a sound she would hear for the rest of her life, which was forty-one people going completely silent at the same time.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Louder," Aldo said.
"I'm sorry, Livia."
"For what?"
"For speaking about something that wasn't mine."
Nobody moved.
Sera looked at the tablecloth eighteen inches from her face and waited for it to be over.
"Well," Aldo said. "Now. See, the thing is, I don't think she means it."
And that was when she understood what had actually happened to her.
He was never going to accept it. That was the design. There was no sentence she could have said, because the point was never the apology, the point was how long a Caravella could be kept on the floor in front of the Cardone men while a Grieco watched.
Rafe said, "Aldo."
"I'm only saying"
"Aldo." Still level. Still nothing on his face. But he didn't stand up, and he didn't end it, because ending it was the one thing he couldn't afford.
It was Livia who ended it.
She pushed her chair back, went around the table, crouched down in front of Sera in a two-thousand-dollar dress, and took both her hands.
"Get up," she said quietly. "Please get up."
"Livia, sit down," her uncle said.
"No."
She said it to the room, and she said it with the old man's face on, and the temperature in there changed by about ten degrees.
"She apologized. I accepted. It's finished, and the next person who says otherwise can explain to me why he's using my brother's name to win a hand at dinner."
Nobody said anything.
Livia helped her up.
Rafe stood then. He put his hand out.
Sera looked at it.
Then she picked up her bag, walked the length of the long room, and went out through the doors without touching anybody.
She got about thirty feet into the cold before her legs stopped working and she had to put a hand on a parked car.
Behind her the door opened and closed.
She didn't turn around.
"If that's my mother, tell her I'll send for my things."
"It's not your mother."
Rafe stood there with his hands in his pockets.
"I couldn't have stopped it," he said.
"I know."
"Then you know what it would have cost."
"I know exactly what it would have cost." She got herself upright. "I do the books, Rafe. I know what everything in your life costs. That's why I'm the only person you've ever been able to make pay for it."
He didn't answer that.
"I'll fix it," he said.
"There's nothing to fix. There's just the next dinner. And the one after that."
She found her keys.
"You want to do something for me? Answer a question."
"Ask it."
"The tunnel road. Three years ago." She watched his face. "Who called you that night? Before it happened. Not after."
And Rafe Grieco, who had never once in four years hesitated in front of her, hesitated.
It lasted less than a second.
It was the loudest thing she had ever heard.