Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 12

Rule One: Don’t Fall for the Don Chapter 12: Three Words

Sal’s car pulled off Van Brunt Street at 6:14 in the morning.

Four of them stood on the sidewalk in the snow in pajamas. Nico waving with both arms like a man landing a plane. Benny with the painting pressed to his chest. Gio filming, obviously. Matteo in Gio’s arms in dinosaur pajamas, one hand up, not moving – and somehow that was the one that broke me.

Five men lived in that building.

Only four on the sidewalk.

I told myself I wasn’t going to look back.

I looked back.

We got four blocks and hit the light at Hamilton, and I was crying so hard I didn’t hear it at first.

Then – footsteps on ice. Running.

Something hit the side of the car.

I turned and Rafe was there, both palms flat on my window, no coat, no shoes, socks soaked through in the slush, breathing like he’d sprinted the whole way. Which he had.

I got the window down.

He couldn’t talk. He shoved something through the gap into my lap.

A cannoli box. Crushed on one corner. And folded on top of it, a piece of paper in handwriting I knew now – handwriting I’d read eleven times on a

bedroom floor.

Three words.

I love you.

The same three I’d written under his ribbon.

“I opened it,” he gasped. “I’m sorry. I opened it, I couldn’t wait-”

I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and kissed him through a car window at a red light on Hamilton Avenue while Sal very kindly examined his mirrors.

“Two hundred and thirty miles,” Rafe said against my mouth. “That’s four hours. That’s nothing. I’ll drive it every weekend. Nora – I am not letting go, do you understand me? I don’t care how far-”

“Say it once more.”

“I love you.”

“Again.”

“I love you. Go be brilliant. Come back to me.”

I put my hand flat on the glass and he put his over it, and then the light changed, and I watched him get smaller in the mirror, standing in the snow in his socks, until the road turned.

Washington was gray and loud and full of the smartest people I have ever

worked beside.

Nine hundred hours of case files. Structuring. Trade-based laundering. Shell layering. On my eleventh day I sat across a table from three federal attorneys

and walked them through a nine-jurisdiction fraud in forty minutes, and one of them said, where did they find you, and I went into a stairwell afterward and cried like a normal person.

And for three weeks, we were fine. Better than fine.

He called at six before the market run and at ten after close. He mailed me

a flannel that still smelled like cedar. Matteo mailed me eleven drawings, and

–

Benny reported that he had started humming out loud, in the kitchen, while

he set the table.

Rafe sent me a photo of the note from under my bed, taped to his mirror.

It found me, he wrote.

Then week four happened.

The calls got shorter. He was tired. Reopening, inspections, lawyers.

Then Gio posted a photo from the soft opening. Rafe in the corner in a real shirt. A woman in a beautiful coat with her hand on his arm, laughing up at

him.

I stared at it for forty minutes and hated myself for every one.

I texted: Everything okay?

Three hours. Nothing.

I called Friday. Voicemail.

I called Saturday. Voicemail.

Sunday at 4 a.m., my phone lit up in the dark.

It wasn’t Rafe.

It was Nico.

And Nico never calls.

“Nora,” he said, and his voice was wrong, completely wrong, thick and shaking. “Okay. Don’t panic. Are you sitting down?”