Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 14

Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 14: The Light Over the Door

Six weeks later, I came home for real.

Not with a car full of everything I owned and the wrong idea about the address. With a moving truck, a New York license, and a badge that read QUINN, N. – FINANCIAL CRIMES, EASTERN DISTRICT.

The truck turned onto Van Brunt at four in the afternoon in April, and I saw the green awning and the light burning over the door in broad daylight, and my chest went tight the way it does when you finally understand what the word

home is for.

There was a banner across the front. Hand-painted, obviously by Benny, obviously ruined by Gio:

WELCOME BACK NORA – PLEASE MAKE PANCAKES

Nico was on the roof for reasons that were never explained. Sal was holding a balloon like a hostage. Gio was filming. Mrs. Abara stood in her doorway with Bishop in a tiny sweater. Otto lost his mind in the street.

And on the bottom step, with Matteo on his hip and no sling, stood Rafe.

Cleared eleven days ago. Santa Lucia had reopened in March – every chair right side up, every dollar through the front door, a liquor license in his own name and a health grade in the window he was insufferable about.

The Ferraros had settled: two weekends a month, and Serafina had cried in the hallway, and Rafe had let her hold her grandson for an hour and then

driven her home.

He’d told me about it by texting me a photo of the signature page and the words is this okay.

I’d sent back forty-one exclamation points.

I got out of the truck and he met me on the sidewalk and kissed me in front of everyone, and Nico fell off the roof. (Four feet. Into the awning. He was fine. He claimed emotional damages.)

Then Rafe pulled a small box out of his jacket.

Not that kind of box – not yet, and he knew it, because we’d talked about at 2 a.m. a hundred times on the phone, the way you can only talk to someone

who lets silence sit between the sentences.

Inside was a ring. Simple. Gold. A tiny key.

“It’s not a proposal,” he said quickly. “It’s a promise. It’s me saying it out loud instead of leaving it on a step and running away.”

My hand shook, and he laughed at me, and I laughed at him, and he slid it on.

“Say it,” I told him.

“I love you.”

“Again.”

“I’m going to say it every day for the rest of my life,” he said, “so you should probably pace yourself.”

Some things you should know.

Julian Voss pled out in June. Felony stalking, unlawful entry, two counts of criminal contempt. Thirty-two months, five years’ probation, permanent no-contact order in three states. Vega called me herself. I sat down on the floor of my office at Cadman Plaza and breathed properly for the first time in

two years.

Carmine Ferraro is facing eleven counts and my memo is exhibit four. I won’t be in that courtroom. Somebody else will read the numbers. That’s the wall,

and I keep it.

The second necklace is nowhere. I dropped it off the Brooklyn Bridge on a

Tuesday.

I wear the first one every day.

Gio and Delia got together in May, because the guy who beat him to it turned out to be somebody who ghosted her in February, and Gio – brave, stupid, wonderful Gio – asked again anyway.

–

Benny sold his first painting. It was of a light over a door.

Sal still sleeps eleven hours a day.

Nico still sleeps on the couch sometimes, and now it’s because he wants to,

and none of us mention it.

Matteo talks. Not a lot. He has his father’s economy with words. But he reads out loud to Otto every night, and last Tuesday he called me from the top of the stairs and asked me to check the closet, and I did, and there was nothing in it, and that is the best sentence in this entire book.

–

And the note the one that spent two months under my bed, the one that started everything and almost ended it – is framed in our kitchen, next to a chore chart nobody follows.

You don’t owe anybody breakfast.

I make it anyway. Every Sunday. For five men who used to be something