Chapter 5 The Family Table

Bella's POV

Nine forks.

I counted them twice before I sat down, because counting keeps my hands still, and because it was easier than looking at the five people already at the table.

The table was long enough that you'd have to raise your voice to insult somebody at the far end of it.

And I got the feeling they managed.

"There she is."

A man my age stood up before anyone else moved. Dark curls, open collar, and a face that had clearly never been in trouble in its life.

"Nico," he said, pulling out the chair beside him. "Second-worst brother. Sit here, you'll want the view."

"View of what?"

"Everyone else." He pushed my chair in. "Backs to the window is a rookie mistake in this family."

I laughed.

It came out before I could stop it, and it surprised me, because I hadn't laughed once since the wedding.

At the far end, an older man folded his newspaper and smiled at me with his whole face.

"Welcome, cara."

Seventy-something. Soft around the middle, white hair, glasses pushed up on his head. He looked like somebody's grandfather at a christening.

"You'll forgive the fuss," he said. "This house hasn't had a young wife in it for a long time. The staff get excited and put out every fork they own."

"I noticed."

"Don't use the small one. Nobody knows what it's for. I've asked."

I liked him straight away, and then I thought about the fact that I liked him straight away, because in this family that was probably information about me and not about him.

At the head of the table sat the Don.

Salvatore Moretti didn't stand, didn't smile, and didn't look up from his coffee.

"Sit."

I sat.

Behind his chair, against the wall, stood the man in the gray suit from my wedding. The one who told me I'd be Mrs. Moretti in about four minutes.

He didn't say good morning. He didn't say anything at all. He stood with his hands folded in front of him and watched the room, and his eyes passed over me without stopping.

Then the doors opened and they brought my husband in.

Luca pushed the chair. Matteo's head was down and his shoulders were loose, and he didn't look up when the wheels crossed the wooden strip in the middle of the floor and thumped.

They parked him at his place. Nobody said good morning to him.

A servant set a plate down, picked up his knife and fork, and started cutting his food into pieces.

Not one person at that table reacted.

Not the Don. Not the gray suit. Not the boy with the coffee pot.

A grown man was being fed like a toddler in a room full of his own family, and it was less interesting to any of them than the newspaper.

I put my hands in my lap so nobody could see what they were doing.

"Morning, Bella."

The last brother had been eating since before I came in.

Dante Moretti was thick through the neck and shoulders, sleeves rolled up, jacket hanging open, already on his second drink, which I only noticed because it wasn't coffee.

He tipped the glass down the table.

"Wheels hold up last night?"

The servant kept cutting.

"Sorry?"

"The chair. Big house, long corridors." He put a whole piece of bread in his mouth and talked around it. "A man could hurt himself. Or not. That's the trouble, nobody can tell with him."

"Dante," Enzo said comfortably, buttering toast. "It's her first morning."

"I'm being welcoming."

"You're being loud. They're different. Your mother could tell them apart."

Dante laughed and drank and went back to his plate like he'd told the joke well.

Matteo said nothing.

He just sat with his eyes half down and his mouth slightly open, slow and empty, like a man listening to a radio in another room.

When the servant put a piece of food near his hand, it took him four seconds to reach for it.

Four seconds. I know, because by then I was counting.

This wasn't the man who told me last night to lock my door.

I ate my eggs and watched my husband disappear in front of me.

"He has bad days," Nico said quietly, near my ear. "Don't take it personally."

"Is it always like this?"

"No. Some mornings he's almost himself." He said it kindly, and he said it like he was sorry about it. "Eat something. If you don't eat, Uncle Enzo worries, and when he worries he tells stories, and they run forty minutes."

"I heard that," Enzo said.

"You were meant to."

I laughed again, and nobody at that table minded, and for about ten seconds it was almost like being somewhere normal.

Then I noticed what the Don was doing, which was nothing.

He hadn't looked at Matteo once.

Not when they wheeled him in. Not when the servant started cutting.

His eyes went to the door, to Enzo, to Dante, to his cup. They went around his own son the way water goes around a rock.

I don't know why that got into my chest the way it did.

My family laughed at me for twenty-five years, so I know that one. I'd never once thought about the other one. About being looked past by your own father, at your own table, every morning, for nine years.

Then Dante reached over for the salt, and his jacket fell open.

It was there less than a second. The black grip of a gun against a white shirt, just inside the lining.

I quickly looked away, the way you do when you've seen something you weren't meant to see.

And that was when Matteo's eyes moved.

One flick. Left, down, to the jacket.

Then back to his plate, before Dante had finished straightening up.

Slow man. Bad day. Four seconds to pick up a piece of bread.

But his eyes went to that gun the second it showed, and came back before it was covered.

Under the table, out of the room's sight but not out of mine, his hand rested flat on his knee.

It wasn't shaking.

It wasn't doing anything. No twitch, none of that loose heaviness of a hand that's forgotten what it's for. It sat there like a hand waiting to be told something.

"Salt," Dante said, and knocked over Matteo's glass.

I saw him do it.

I want to be fair, because I'd been in that house two days and I was already suspicious of everybody. But I saw his wrist. He turned his hand over and pushed.

Water went across the cloth and into Matteo's lap.

Matteo didn't move.

Dante sat back.

And the whole table waited.

That's what I'll remember. Not the glass. The waiting.

Nine people in that room, servants included, holding still with their eyes down, all of them waiting to find out whether this was the kind of morning where everyone laughs.

My heart was going hard enough that I could hear it.

"Pick it up," I suddenly said.

The boy with the coffee pot stopped where he stood. Nobody chewed.

Dante's smile arrived a beat late.

"What?"

"The glass." My voice stayed calm, which I didn't expect and have never managed since. "You knocked it over. So pick it up."

He laughed.

Loud, out of the chest, the same laugh he'd given his own joke about the wheels.

It went on about two seconds too long, and then it came apart in the middle, because there was nothing underneath it.

Nobody joined in. Nobody smiled. The room just let him do it alone, and I saw a very large man find out, in front of his father, that he was standing there by himself.

He picked up the glass and then set it down hard enough to make a point. But he picked it up.

At the head of the table, the Don put down his cup.

And then Salvatore Moretti looked at me.

It lasted maybe four seconds, and I felt all four of them, and that was when I finally knew what people mean when they say a room goes quiet for a man.

"Madonna," Enzo said happily, "if she's counting the glasses now, Dante, you're finished. Nobody in this house has ever made you tidy anything."

Somebody let out a breath. Cutlery started up again. The boy poured the coffee.

°°°°°

They left in order of importance, and I hadn't known it was a thing people did until I saw it happen.

The Don first, with the gray suit behind him. Dante next, without looking at me. Nico squeezed my shoulder on the way past and said something about the stables. Luca turned Matteo's chair for the door.

Enzo came around the end of the table with his newspaper under his arm.

He stopped beside me and rested a hand on my shoulder. A grandfather's hand. Warm, heavy, the kind that means sit still, you're safe.

"You did a good thing," he said. "He doesn't get many."

"It was a glass."

"It's never a glass, cara."

He patted my shoulder twice. Then he didn't take his hand away, and I looked up.

He was studying my face.

Not the way men look at a young wife. Slower than that, and sadder.

His eyes went over my eyes, my mouth, my chin, like a page he'd read a long time ago and wanted to check one line of.

"You look very much like someone I used to know," he said.

"Who?"

Enzo smiled at me.

"Nobody important," he said. "She died a long time ago.”