The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 14

The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 14: Five Years Later

The Costa Desk handles the cases nobody else will touch.

Four hundred and eleven sit–downs last year. Nine families. Three countries.

Bodies: zero. That is a number I am not allowed to be proud of out loud in my line of work, so I’m saying it here.

My office has windows.

That still surprises me some mornings.

Gianna is twenty–four and in law school, which she blames entirely on me.

“You ruined me,” she says, roughly monthly. “I was going to do something normal.”

“You wanted to be an influencer.”

“I would have been excellent.”

Bianca runs the whole house now. She has an office bigger than mine and has never once let me forget who dug the

key–card logs out of the system at 2 a.m.

Mr. Abruzzi, seventy–six, comes to every fund ceremony and cries at every single one.

And Dominic –

Dominic still drives a nine–year–old gray sedan, still eats standing up, still says the most devastating things in the

flattest possible voice.

He put a ring on my finger on a terrace in Palermo three years ago, and the inscription inside isn’t a date.

It says calmest in the room.

He had to ask Abruzzi to find the letter to get the wording right. He never told me. Abruzzi did, immediately, because

Abruzzi cannot keep a secret to save his life.

Last month I stood at a podium in front of two hundred people, under a photograph of a silver–haired man with my

eyes.

The Raffaele Costa Fund.

“People ask where I went,” I said. “Here’s the honest answer. My father died on a bridge with his head in my lap, and everything I knew came from him, so every time I picked up a phone I was holding a dead man’s hand. So I stopped.