Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 10

Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 10: The Worst Best Night of My Life

I took it to Rafe at one in the morning.

He looked at the page for a long time. Then he said the name I hadn’t wanted to say out loud.

“Carmine.”

His father’s best friend. His brother’s consigliere. The man who had signed

the check for both funerals.

“Serafina Ferraro is his cousin,” Rafe said, very quietly. “If Matteo goes to the Ferraros, Carmine runs Red Hook by summer.” He set the paper down with enormous care, like it might go off. “He bought himself a stalker. He aimed a man at you, to put me in a cell, to take my son.”

“Rafe-”

“Give it all to Vega,” he said. “Every page. Tomorrow.”

That’s the thing nobody tells you about doing the right thing.

It gets you noticed.

Eight days later my phone rang on a Tuesday afternoon. A 202 area code.

“Ms. Quinn? Dana Reyes, Hartline Fellowship – Financial Crimes Enforcement. Detective Vega forwarded your workup on the Delaware LLC.” A pause. “It’s the cleanest tracing memo I’ve read this year. And you did it in a

shoebox.”

I’d applied in June. From another life. From an apartment where I slept with a

chair under the doorknob.

Six hundred applicants. Ten seats. Washington.

I had wanted this since I was nine years old, sitting in a courtroom in a dress with a bow on it, watching a judge give my father eleven years because nobody in that room could read the numbers for him.

“We’d like to offer you a seat,” Dana said. “One complication – the cohort start moved up. We need you in D.C. by the eighteenth.”

I looked at the calendar on the fridge, the one with Matteo’s stickers all over

The eighteenth was six days away.

“And if I can’t?”

“Then it goes to the alternate,” she said kindly. “I’m sorry. It’s a hard offer.”

I hung up.

Behind me the door opened and Rafe came in with snow in his hair and two coffees, and he looked so happy, and he said, “Come out with me Thursday. Just us. There’s a place on Smith Street. I’ll wear a real shirt.”

And I said yes.

And I didn’t tell him.

I spent four hours getting ready for a date I was going to ruin.

Benny did my eyeliner. Gio lit me like a film set and took thirty photographs. Matteo sat on the bathroom counter and clipped a plastic barrette into my hair with enormous seriousness, and Nico cried and blamed the onions he had not been chopping.

Rafe was waiting by the door in a real shirt, hair pushed back, and when he saw me he forgot how words worked. He just stood there.

“Say something,” I said.

“I can’t.”

Best compliment of my life.

We never made it to Smith Street. We got cannoli from the place on Court and ate them on a bench at the end of the pier with the whole city lit up across the water, and he told me things I’d never heard.

That he’d wanted to be an EMT. That he chose the Marines because his

mother’s hands shook too badly to hold a pen and somebody had to send money home. That the reason he doesn’t talk is that in the house he grew up in, talking meant shouting, and silence meant everybody was still okay.

That when Gia died, Matteo stopped speaking in the same week, and he’d been terrified ever since that he’d made him that way – a quiet man raising a quiet boy in a quiet house.

And that he’d bought me a necklace.

I stopped breathing. “What?”

“Your first night.” He wouldn’t look at me. “Nico said you’d driven here alone to a building full of strangers with everything you owned in the back seat. I thought that was the bravest thing I’d ever heard. So I walked twenty blocks to the only place still open and I left it on the step with a note and I walked away like a coward-”

“Rafe.”

Th

and then you never mentioned it, so I figured you thought it was sick And then he left the second one and I thought I was going to be sick-

I grabbed his hand. “There was a note?”

‘There was a note

We sat there with the cold coming off the water

“I never got it,” I said

He laughed once, helplessly, and dragged a hand down his face. Two months. Two months of hell over a piece of paper”

Then he turned toward me, and his knee touched mine, and his voice went

low and terrifyingly senous

“Nora I’ve been trying to say something all night and I keep chickening out so I’m going to say it badly I want you to

“I got the fellowship.” I said

It fell out of me sideways Ugly Fast The way you rip a bandage off because you’re a coward too

He stopped.

“Washington,” I said. My eyes were burning Financial crimes. Six hundred applicants. Ten seats”

The harbor kept moving. The silence lasted so long I could hear it

“When,” he said.

“The eighteenth. Six days.”

He nodded slowly. He looked out at the black water. And I watched every door inside him close, one after another, quietly, exactly the way they’d been closed the day I met him.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Rafe-”

“No, I mean it.” His voice was perfectly even and it destroyed me. “That’s the thing you wanted before you wanted anything. That’s a nine-year-old in a courtroom. You should go.”

Then he drove me home in a silence I had no map for, and said goodnight through my closed door, and I lay on the floor and cried into a twelve-dollar

box of cannoli.

Two hundred and thirty miles away, a seat with my name on it started counting down.