Page 80 of Promised to the Don of Naples
I sat down on the bedroom floor, facing the open wall, the box at my feet.
I had no right to open it.
But I'd already opened everything, and I'd already opened up the truth of my whole life over the last three weeks.
I broke the seal and took out the paper.
It was her handwriting, three pages of it…
Salvatore
I know about the scheme. I've known since two thousand ten. I saw the papers in your study and I read all of it. I didn't ask you, because I wanted to understand it on my own first. And because I knew you'd lie to me, and I didn't want the humiliation of hearing your lies to my face.
I stayed quiet for two years. I won't anymore.
Salvatore, I'm going to die.
The doctors told me in January. Cancer. Advanced stage. They give me three years at most.
I'm not going to tell you. You'll find out late, the way you find out everything in this house. But I need you to know one thing before I go.
If you don't stop the scheme, Salvatore, if you don't undo everything you did to the Morettis, to Don Marco, to his son, Luca, whom you've loved like a son since he was a boy in Capri—if you don't stop now, before I die—you'll pay in a way that will cost you far more than money.
You'll lose both your children.
I don't know how, I have no way of knowing, but I know it. A mother knows certain things, and I've been a mother for twenty-five years.
Matteo is just like you in his pride, and pride will kill him.
Valentina is just like me in her stubbornness. She'll find out everything, one day. And when she does, she won't forgive you.
I ask you for only one thing, Salvatore. For the twenty-six years we spent together. For that first night in Mondello in nineteen eighty-six. For Matteo's birth in the rain. For Valentina's birth in the August heat.
Stop this.
Or else they die. Both of them. In different ways. But both.
—Lucia
I read it three times.
On the third time I cried. Not because of the letter—I cried because of the name at the end.
Lucia.
I hadn't heard my mother's full name in so many years. At home everyone called her mamma. Her letters, the few I'd kept, she always signed with just the first letter. L.
The first time in ten years that I saw her whole name written in her own hand—it was in a letter warning my father that he was going to kill her children.
And he hadn't stopped.
She died in two thousand thirteen. Thirteen months after that letter.
And in two thousand fifteen he took Matteo from Capri by force. And in two thousand nineteen he faked Matteo's death. And in two thousand twenty-three he promised me to Luca.
She had warned him. She had written it down.
And he had kept the letter in a steel box behind a painting of Saint Sebastian, in the room he'd locked so no one could come in.
