Page 25 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

He tells me about five calls to a Toronto number from the phone in the front hall, at three and four in the morning, when only one person in this house was ever awake. Everybody knew who she was.

He tells me about a restaurant downtown. A corner table. A man reaching for the bill.

And when he’s done, and he looks at me with cold, dark eyes—

“That’s not—” My voice isn’t working properly. “Marcello, I don’t even know what half of those are—”

“Two men died.”

The air between us turns sharp with tension.

“Emilio Garcia,” he grates out. “He was in his forties. He drove for my father before he drove for me. There was a boy in the car with him, nineteen years old, whose mother worked in my mother’s kitchen.”

I can’t breathe.

“They came off a quarry road outside Gary that November. I buried them both. So when I was handed eleven pages saying my wife had sold them—” He stops. “That is what was in the folder.”

And I realize that’s why...

That’s why he can’t allow himself to forgive me.

Because he thinks...

“You think I killed them,” I whisper. “D-Don’t you?”

Chisa

HE’S NOT COMING BACK.

I knew from the start it was foolish of me to wait for him, but that’s what I did.

I waited for him, crying and hoping that he’d come back, and he’d tell me...

No.

He doesn’t believe I’m a killer.

But it’s already four in the morning, and so I know.

He’s not coming back.

The words echo in my mind endlessly as I take a pen and a stack of Rica’s old worksheets down to the nursery, then sit on the floor to work out who killed two men. I know I may still end up grasping at straws here, but doing something is better than nothing. Doing something is what will keep me from just crying and crying until I’m in danger of forgetting I have a baby girl to think of.

So let’s do this, Chisa.

The way Marcello’s world works, I have a feeling that the moment evidence was presented against me, no one questioned it. That was it for them. And so it’s up to me to clear my name. I may not be a trained detective. Or even a super smart person at that. But I don’t have to be either. I just need to remember what happened in those weeks, and so...

Let’s see.

I remember what I used to do at Lutrell’s when the stock book didn’t match the till. I need to retrace everything, go through every transaction until I find the discrepancy, and so that’s what I do, too.

I go back. Day by day. Line by line.

The route first, because that’s the one he keeps coming back to.

November. The drive to Ana Lucia’s cousin in Indiana, eleven hours in the back of the car with my feet up on the seat because my ankles had gone. Marcello beside me, working. Vico in the front with Joey.

Somewhere past Hammond I woke up. We’d stopped for fuel. It was dark, and raining.