Page 152 of Promised to the Don of Naples
"Lucia used to stand here too," the nonna said. "Before dawn. In this same spot. Looking at this same sea." She rested her hand on the parapet next to mine. "It's good to know the balcony's still in use."
I felt a knot in my throat.
"Nonna. Thank you. For everything."
She didn't answer right away, just looked at the sea a while longer. Then she said, low:
"When you go back to Posillipo, signora, play the whole Chopin." She looked at me. "You never finished that nocturne. I know—you always stopped in the middle." Her black eyes shone in the moonlight. "But now you've settled your accounts. Now you can finish the music."
I went still.
"You think I can?"
"I know you can." The nonna squeezed my hand on the parapet. "A woman who settles her accounts finishes the music, signora. Always."
She kissed my forehead. And went back inside, slowly, the cane tapping on the tile.
I looked at the sea of Capri one last time.
I think I can now, Mamma. I think I finally can.
CHAPTER 48
"My husband spent his life turning houses into fortresses. Now I watch him make the way back—opening the windows takes more courage than closing them."
Luca moretti
The first thing I did when we got back from Capri was let half the soldiers go.
The war was over. Salvatore was dead. The Cosa Nostra in Palermo stayed neutral—the Capo dei Capi had sent, the week after the funeral, a bottle of wine and a one-line note: La pace è la pace.
So I didn't need sixteen men on the property anymore. I kept six—the ones I needed, the usual ones. The other ten I moved into the businesses, with a raise, because a man who serves in war deserves a job in peace.
Then I had the windows opened.
All of them. The ones in the music room, the ones in the green room, the ones in the halls that had stayed behind heavy curtains and closed shutters through months of siege.
Donna Beatrice walked through the house behind me opening every one, and the November sun came into rooms that had been in the dark since the October attack.
I hired a gardener. An old man from Posillipo, recommended by the nonna, who knew grapevines. I asked him to look after my great-grandfather's vines and Donna Beatrice's lemon tree, which had grown wild during the war.
Matteo worked with me now. Not in the Camorra—Raffaele took over that part, official, with all the weight. Matteo I put in Moretti Holdings, on the legal side, in import. He had a head for numbers, always had, even as a boy in Capri.
From a prisoner in my cellar to a partner in my legal office in seven months.
Life is like that.
I passed by the room that was going to become the child's room.
I stopped in the doorway. It was my mother's room—the room where Valentina slept her first night in Posillipo, locked from the outside, hating all of us. Then it became the nonna's room when she came from Capri.
And now it was going to become a grandchild's room.
I looked at my mother's old furniture. The vanity. The crucifix. The painting of the Madonna and Child.
Mamma, I thought. You'd like to know. Your room became your grandchild's room. The house Papà made a fortress, I'm making a home again. The way you wanted, before he ruined everything.
VALENTINAMORETTI
