Page 8 of Promised to the Don of Naples
"I'm going to ask you a question," he said, low and controlled. "And you're going to tell me the truth, because if you lie, I'll know, and the next time you feel like running, I'll have this wall locked too."
I looked at him without blinking.
"Ask, then."
"What are you doing in my vineyard at five in the morning, Valentina?"
The right answer would have been: running. The right answer would have been: what does it look like, idiot? The right answer would have been anything that kept a wall between the two of us.
But I looked at him, held his gaze a second longer, and the thing that came out of my mouth wasn't any of the three. It was the question that had been eating at me since two in the morning, the one that had sent me down the wall, the one my father had hidden from me my whole life:
"Why are you and my brother together in a photo in your house?"
He went still. For a very short moment I saw something cross his face. It didn't look like surprise—something else. Something more like weariness than shock, like a man who'd been waiting for this question and had expected it to come later than it did.
When he answered, his voice had changed.
"Go back to the house, Valentina."
"Answer me."
"Go back to the house."
"Answer me first."
He looked at me. And out of nowhere, he reached out and took my elbow. Not with violence—with firmness. Like a man steadying a woman about to fall, not like a man seizing a runaway.
"I'll answer you, but not today. And not before your father gets here, because your father arrives Friday for the engagement dinner, and I want him at my table when you hear the answer. Do you understand?"
I didn't understand, but I nodded. Because the way he said it—your father—wasn't the way a man talks about someone he's expecting as an ally, but the way a man talks about someone he's expecting as an enemy.
He let go of my elbow, then took his jacket off the olive tree.
"Come on. I'll walk you back to the house." And then, with a very small, very cold smile, he said, "Around the north side. Not over the wall."
He led me back through the vineyard, me limping at his side, without another word the whole two hundred yards to a service gate I hadn't seen, which he opened with a key he took from his pocket. We crossed the orchard and went up through the pantry door. In the corridor, before the stairs, he stopped.
"Valentina Rossi... Welcome to my house."
Then he left without waiting for an answer.
I climbed the two flights of stairs with my ankle throbbing, went into his dead mother's room through the service door that was still unlocked, and sat on the edge of the bed,holding my elbow at the exact spot where his hand had touched it.
My elbow was burning. And I hated, so much, so much, so much, that it was burning...
CHAPTER4
"Red isn't the color of a bride or a widow. It's the color of a woman who decided to be neither."
VALENTINA ROSSI
The seamstress arrived Wednesday morning, and Donna Beatrice came with her.
Donna Beatrice had been the Morettis' housekeeper for thirty-two years. She had white hair scraped back into a steel-hard bun, small black eyes, and a way of walking into a room that made the walls step back out of respect. She came into my room without knocking and took the measure of the room before she took the measure of me.
"Stand up," she said.
"Good morning to you too."
