Page 26 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

There was a man in a camel coat under the little plastic hood of a payphone, with his back to the car.

I thought he was calling a girl. Vico always had a girl.

I write it down.

Gas station, Hammond, November, V at payphone.

My hand won’t keep still, so I write it twice.

Then the dinner.

I’ve gone over that evening so many times in eight years that it’s worn smooth. But I’ve never once gone over it forwards, from the beginning, the way you check a column of figures.

Vico came to find me in the kitchen. A man had turned up in the city with Nonna Cristina’s ring—the one stolen in Palermo before Marcello was born, the one Ana Lucia still talked about every Christmas.

He wanted to sell it back to the family. Wasn’t that extraordinary? Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to give Marcello for his birthday?

And I’d know if it was real, wouldn’t I? I worked with stones.

He’d come with me, he said.

He promised.

Then the restaurant. The corner table. A waiter telling me Mr. Vico had telephoned—so sorry, signora, he’s stuck in traffic, he says to start without him.

So I sat down alone with a man who told me his name was Mr. Ybañez.

He showed me a ring. I turned it to the candle and told him, as politely as I could, that it was paste. Very good paste, but paste.

He laughed, said I had a good eye, paid for my dinner, then left.

Afterwards Vico begged me not to tell Marcello. It would only upset him, all that business about his grandmother.

Let’s keep it between us, Professor.

I thought he was being kind.

I write that down too. My eyes are streaming so hard I have to take my glasses off to do it.

The phone calls are the worst.

Because the calls are the thing Marcello can’t get past. Five of them, at three and four in the morning, from the landline in the front hall. Me. The only person in this house awake at that hour, walking off the cramps.

Only I wasn’t the only one.

I used to meet Vico in the hall. More than once. He’d just be coming in, and he’d laugh, then put his finger to his lips like we were two children sneaking down to the kitchen.

And one night his coat was over the hall chair. The camel one. There was a phone ringing in the pocket—a little silver thing, the kind that flips open, and I’d never seen him with it.

I took it out to bring it up to him.

He came out of the study in the dark and took it off me. Very fast. Then he laughed and told me it was for a married lady, so I mustn’t tell Nonna. And I said yes because that’s what people do when they’re so desperate to win their in-laws’ approval. They ignore their common sense and just—

“He came out of the study,” says a voice behind me.

I jump so hard the pen goes skidding across the floor.

Curzio is in the doorway with a tea tray. I’ve no idea how long he’s been standing there, and I’m sitting cross-legged on a dust sheet surrounded by paper, with my face wet and my glasses in my lap.