Page 9 of Promised to the Don of Naples
"Arms. Up."
The seamstress—a small woman named Lina, pins held in her mouth—started running the tape measure across my bust. Donna Beatrice watched, hands folded in front of her black apron.
"Waist, sixty-three," Lina murmured.
"Sixty-four," I corrected.
"Sixty-three," Lina repeated, without looking at me.
Donna Beatrice took a step forward.
"You have two dinners this week, signorina. Wednesday night, the reception for the Colombo cousins. Friday night, the official engagement. Your father arrives from Palermo at six."
I looked at her in the mirror.
"My father's really coming?"
"Yes."
I swallowed hard. Lina pinned my dress and pricked me by accident, but I didn't move.
"And who else?"
"Close family. The padrone's brother, the consigliere Don Acquaviva, three associates from Rome, and Signora Varga."
"Signora who?"
Donna Beatrice looked at me in the mirror, but those small black eyes didn't blink.
"Bianca Varga. An old friend of the family."
There were certain phrases that walked into a room dressed as one thing and turned out to be another.
An old friend of the familywas one of those.
Donna Beatrice said it exactly the way a sixty-year-old woman who'd served three generations of a family would talk about a mistress—with a professional respect that hid nothing.
"An old friend is coming to my engagement dinner."
"Signora Varga comes to every important family dinner, signorina."
"Capisco."
I ate lunch alone in the breakfast room.
I ate half and pushed the rest away. I'd asked for a simple tray—bread, buffalo mozzarella, tomato, a glass of white wine—because my stomach had been in knots since the vineyard, Monday.
I hadn't seen Luca since that morning before dawn.
Three days.
He'd vanished—meetings, according to Raffaele. I knew what was going on; it was what I'd have done too: promise an important answer and then disappear to buy time until the right moment.
I was on my third sip of wine when I heard footsteps behind me.
"Eating alone like a widow, cognatina?"
Raffaele.
