Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 09

Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 09: The Ledger

Nobody celebrated that night.

Julian was in a holding cell. I was free. And Rafe Bellandi – who had walked into a police station for me, who had handed a stranger his bedroom in four minutes – had an assault charge and a custody petition, all inside eight

hours.

He didn’t say a word about it. Of course he didn’t.

I found him in the restaurant kitchen at two in the morning, sharpening

knives he was never going to use.

“Don’t,” he said, before I opened my mouth.

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to apologize.”

“I was going to apologize.”

He set the steel down. “Then don’t. Because it wasn’t a mistake, Nora, and I would like to be allowed to have done one thing on purpose.”

“He’s your son-”

“He had you in a corner.” His voice finally cracked – one hairline fracture in all that granite. “I came through that door and he had you in a corner and you were making yourself small. You do that. Did you know you do that? You fold yourself up so you won’t be anybody’s problem.” He looked up, and his eyes were wet and furious. “So no. I’m not sorry. Let me not be sorry.”

I crossed that kitchen and kissed him.

He made a sound against my mouth like a man who’d been holding his breath for two months, and then his arms came around me and he lifted me clean off the tile, and I laughed into the kiss and felt him smile.

Rafe Bellandi smiled.

“Say it again,” I whispered. “The thing from the greenhouse.”

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you since you told me to watch you.”

The family went to war.

Nonna Vittoria flew up from Florida and hired a lawyer who charges by the syllable. Benny made a binder. Mrs. Abara wrote an affidavit in beautiful handwriting that began I have watched that man raise that boy alone. Vega – grudgingly, and only because she hates stalkers more than she hates the Bellandis – filed a supplemental report stating in plain English that Rafe had interrupted a felony in progress.

And Gio, who has four terabytes of footage and no fear of God, cut the bodega cameras, the order of protection, and the diner video into a six-minute file and sent it to the Kings County DA, the family’s lawyer, and allegedly by accident – a reporter at the Daily News.

Both hearings were set for the twelfth.

–

And for nine days, that building was the happiest place on earth.

We ate at a table. We ignored the chore chart. I slept with my door unlocked and Rafe slept in his own bed and Matteo slept through the night for the first

time in over a year.

He kissed me in the kitchen with flour on his hands. He held my hand under the table like a fourteen-year-old. He talked more in nine days than in the

previous two months combined, and every sentence felt like a gift somebody had wrapped for me personally.

On Sunday, Matteo climbed into my lap during a documentary about octopuses, pulled my arms around himself like a seatbelt, and fell asleep.

I thought: this is it. This is my life now.

Then, on the tenth day, Rafe put a shoebox of receipts on the kitchen table and said the thing he’d clearly been building up to for a week.

“The restaurant reopens in April. Legitimate. Everything through the front door.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know how to prove that to a judge. You do.”

So I read the books.

I read them for eleven hours, and somewhere around midnight I stopped

breathing.

Because the restaurant had been closed for fourteen months – and in those fourteen months, four hundred and six thousand dollars had moved through

Out. In twenty-two payments. To a consulting LLC registered in Delaware.

I pulled the filing. Sole officer of record, incorporated eighteen months ago in

Boston.

I knew that signature.

I’d watched that hand sign nine hundred documents from the desk outside

his office.

Someone in this family had been paying Julian Voss since before I ever

heard the name Bellandi.