Page 157 of Promised to the Don of Naples
He'd come back from the dead. And now there he was, barefoot in Capri, making faces at my daughter.
I looked at the whole scene from the terrace.
The house full. People, life, summer, fish in the bag, a baby in her great-grandmother's lap, my best friend beside me with a hidden cigarette, my brother alive in the garden. The exact opposite of the silent fortress of Posillipo during the war.
The opposite of the silence of the convent. The opposite of everything I'd known before.
And I thought of them.
Of Lucia. Of Marta. The two mothers who used to sit on a bench just like that one, in this same garden, some summer in the nineties, watching their children—me, Matteo, Luca, Raffaele—run through the vineyard. The two mothers drinking limoncello, talking, not knowing what would come, not knowing the war, not knowing the hatred.
Now they were both dead.
And now it was me sitting in the garden, my daughter in her grandmother's lap, my generation on the terrace.
The cycle had repeated. But this time, without the man who ruined everything.
This time, in peace.
LUCA MORETTI
In the late afternoon I took Aurora for myself.
The nonna was already tired, and Aurora had woken from her nap in a bad mood, the way she got—all red, her fists clenched, angry at the world.
Just like her mother.
I put her in my lap, on the terrace, and she calmed down little by little, gripping my shirt with that tiny hand.
I sat there.
The Don of the Naples Camorra. The man who killed two men with his own hand in an attack, who executed the consigliere of forty years in the cellar of his house, who drove a three-hundred-year-old dagger into the man who called himself his father-in-law.
Sitting on a terrace in Capri, in summer, with a five-month-old baby asleep on his chest.
I thought I'd die alone. A Don dies young and dies alone—I'd seen it happen to my father, to my uncle, to men I respected. I didn't imagine anything on the other side of the fear. There was nothing on the other side.
Then she arrived.
The bomb Salvatore sent me as a gift. The daughter he sent to hate me and kill me in bed some night in November.
And she loved me.
It was his one miscalculation. And it was my salvation.
Aurora took a deep breath on my chest, over the Latin tattoo, and I looked at her—the black lashes, her mother's mouth, the hand closed on my shirt—and I thought:
I didn't build a fortress. I built this.
Valentina came and sat beside me, on the stone bench, her shoulder against mine.
Aurora between the two of us. Her hair still wet from the sea, the smell of salt and jasmine.
"She's asleep," I said.
"Finally." Valentina put her hand on Aurora's little head. "Bossy and bad-tempered, this child."
"Just like her mother."
