Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 11

Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 11: The Note Under the Bed

For three days, Rafe Bellandi was a ghost in his own building.

Gone before six. Home after midnight. Polite. Devastatingly polite. He passed me the salt. He asked if I needed the car. He said “sleep well” through a closed door.

I have never been so lonely with someone in the same building.

The hearings went our way, and even that felt like it was happening to strangers. The DA dropped the assault to a violation with no jail. The family court judge in Kings County read Vega’s supplemental report, looked at Serafina Ferraro’s lawyer over her glasses, and denied the emergency petition in eleven minutes.

And Carmine Ferraro was arrested on a Wednesday morning coming out of a barbershop on Union Street, on eleven counts, with my tracing memo stapled to the complaint.

Rafe sat in the courthouse hallway afterward with Matteo asleep across his lap and didn’t say anything at all.

On the fourth day, Benny found me on my bedroom floor with a suitcase I couldn’t make myself fill.

“Long distance,” I said. “You did it. Did it work?”

“No.” He sat down against the wall. “But it didn’t fail because of the distance.

It failed because we both decided in advance that it would.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say to me right now.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

Then he helped me clean, because I clean when I’m falling apart, and that’s how it happened.

I was on my knees dragging a tennis ball out from under the bed frame, and my fingers found paper.

Folded. Dusty. Two months old.

I sat back on my heels and opened it.

Nora –

You drove here alone to a building full of strangers with everything you own in the back seat. I don’t know how to say anything out loud, so I’m saying it like this: I think that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.

This place is loud and the refrigerator is a crime scene and Nico will eat your food. But you’re safe here. I’ll make sure of it.

You don’t owe anybody breakfast.

– R

I read it eleven times.

Then I put my forehead on the carpet and sobbed until Benny picked me up

off the floor.

They threw me a farewell dinner on the sixteenth.

Nonna Vittoria came back up from Florida to cook, took one look at my face, and fed me like she was packing a body for winter. Nico made a cake that was ninety percent frosting and structurally unsound. Gio made a video – two months of footage I never knew he was taking. Me screaming at a chore

chart. Me flat on my back on the ice outside the bodega. Me asleep on the couch with all five of them stacked around me like enormous dogs. Mrs. Abara holding Bishop up to the camera saying, “God bless, my darling.”

Sal gave me a Santa Lucia staff jacket with BELLANDI stitched across the back and said, “It was in the dryer. I take no responsibility.”

Benny gave me a painting of the restaurant with the light on over the door.

Gio gave me a framed photo of the ruined caramel pot.

And Matteo gave me a drawing. Six stick figures on a sidewalk, and a seventh one with red hair holding a small hand. Across the top, in wobbly pencil – the first written thing he had ever given anybody:

NORA STAY.

I had to go outside for a while after that.

And Rafe – who came, who sat, who laughed in the right places and never once looked directly at me – gave me nothing at all.

At midnight, drunk and honest, Nico took both my hands.

“Don’t go,” he said.

“Nico-”

“I know. I know. I’m just saying it out loud. Say the thing before somebody says it better, right?” He wiped his face on his sleeve. “You made this a home. Before you, it was a building where five idiots kept our guns.”

I looked across the room at Rafe.

He was watching me. He’d been watching me all night.

And when our eyes met, he looked away.

I packed at 3 a.m. At the bottom of my bag I put his note.

Then I did the bravest thing I have ever done. Braver than the drive. Braver than the police report. Braver than telling six-foot-five of Brooklyn to watch

I took the last cannoli out of the box in the fridge, boxed it, and wrote three words on a slip of paper. Folded it. Slid it under the ribbon.

At six in the morning I knocked on his door.

He opened it already awake, already dressed, eyes red.

“For the road,” I said, and pressed it into his hands. “Don’t open it now.”

He didn’t say anything.

Of course he didn’t.

I walked down three flights, out the door, and got into the car with my whole heart still upstairs.