Page 32 of Banished and Pregnant by Her Sicilian Billionaire Husband

The older woman kneels down and takes my hands. “W-What happened?”

“I c-can’t seem to stop crying.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers.

She shouldn’t be. This isn’t her fault. And I can’t even say it’s Marcello’s fault either because...

It’s not his fault if he can’t love me.

Right?

“What can I do for you, cara? Tell me, please. I don’t want this to end like it did before. Let me help you. Please.”

Marcello

CURZIO CAME INTO THE study without knocking, which he hadn’t done in thirty years, then put a driver’s logbook down on the desk.

“Read the ninth of March.”

Marcello didn’t move. “Where have you been since six this morning?”

“Elmwood Park. Joey’s garage.” The old man’s coat was still wet. “He keeps every book he ever wrote in. Thirty years of them, in boxes. He stood there and let me go through the lot, because I told him it was for you.” He put one thick finger on the open page. “The ninth of March. Read it.”

9 March. 00:40. Signora B. to Mount Carmel, per Dr. Kho. Waited. 06:15 back to the house. 58 miles.

The room went very quiet.

He didn’t need the folder out of the bank to know that date.

The second page had been a ledger of calls. Dates down one side, times down the other. Five of them, from the landline in the front hall, to a number that had no business being dialled from this city.

One had been made on the ninth of March, at twelve minutes past three in the morning.

“She was in the hospital,” Curzio said. “At three o’clock that morning. The night your ledger says she stood in your front hall with a telephone in her hand, she was lying in a bed at Mount Carmel with a strap round her stomach, listening to the baby’s heart.”

His voice went.

“Joey was in the car park. Doing his crossword.”

Marcello read the line again.

Then a third time, because his eyes kept going over the line without anything arriving, the way they had the night his father died and somebody handed him a paper to sign.

“The ledger could be wrong about the time.” He said it the way a man tests ice.

“It could.”

“Joey could be wrong about the date.”

“When has Joey ever been wrong about a date in his life?” Curzio’s voice cracked. “Figlio mio. Somebody made that call. If it wasn’t her, then who was in this house that night?”

The answer had been in this room since seven o’clock that morning. Standing on the rug in a smudged pair of glasses, with his daughter’s worksheets in her fist.

“Do you understand now? Do you—where are you going?”

Marcello didn’t have the time to answer Curzio. He had already walked out of his study, and his heart was hammering against his chest because he knew...

He had made the biggest mistake of his life.