Chapter 3

Their "just this once" became the staged betrayal on my wedding day that shook all of Sicily.

Before dawn, my father slipped away from the estate with his sons and Eva.

Soon after, the council of elders received an encrypted message.

It said my father had cut a deal with the FBI and turned state's witness, and that he'd taken the family's money-laundering records and the security plans for its territory with him.

My mother read the printout three times over. Then she shook her head.

"That's impossible. Francesco would never do this. He'd eat a bullet before he sold out the family."

But then came the letter my father had left behind.

It didn't explain a thing.

All he wrote was that he was sick of 30 years of marriage and that Mother shouldn't bother looking for him.

Each of my brothers had left a letter too.

Marco told Sofia to take the kids and go back to her parents. Paolo told Teresa, pregnant as she was, to get rid of the baby. Vito's was the cruelest. Their marriage was over, he wrote, and whether he lived or died, she was never to bother him again.

The letters were all brutal. The men had sat down together and chosen every word, all so Eva would buy it.

But back then, none of us knew it was an act.

Mother finished reading and folded Father's letter neatly.

"Fine. If he can turn his back on the family and his honor as Don, then he doesn't need the wife who's stood by him for 30 years either."

She sounded certain, but her hands wouldn't stop shaking.

What finally broke me was the wedding that night.

The wedding cars pulled up to the estate gates right on time.

Dante arrived in his tuxedo, but he never came inside for the ceremony.

I stood on the steps in my wedding dress, sure he would at least explain himself.

Instead, he tore our marriage contract in half in front of every guest.

"The Moretti family betrayed the Alliance and sold themselves to the feds. I'll never marry a traitor's daughter.

"As of today, Isabella and I are done."

The whole crowd erupted.

Some whispered about my father's betrayal. Others declared my family finished. A few simply laughed in my face.

Outside the iron gates, angry foot soldiers even pelted the estate with rotten eggs and tomatoes.

An old soldier who had fought at my father's side for ten years took off his hat and spat on the Moretti nameplate.

"I put my faith in the wrong man. If I'd known he was a rat who'd sell out his own brothers, I'd never have taken that bullet for him."

My mother heard it through the window and went white.

What my father had always treasured most wasn't his power. It was the men who had fought their way through the bloodiest years alongside him.

Every All Souls' Day, he went to the graves of the fallen himself and poured each of them a drink.

Now even those men believed it.

My mother went back to the main hall. One by one, she took the family's medals of honor and the Don's gold ring out of the bulletproof glass case where my father kept them.

She polished each one slowly, then locked them all away in a box.

"Since he really has turned into a rat, these things don't deserve to see daylight again. They'd only shame the men who came before us."

None of us knew that my father was just outside the city, waiting for morning so he could come back and explain.

I couldn't take my eyes off Dante.

Only the night before, he'd told me on the phone that the wedding car would drive all around the city so everyone would know he'd married me.

I looked him in the eye. "You believe my father betrayed us too?"

For a second, Dante hesitated.

All he had to say was that he didn't believe it, and I would have kept waiting.

But Eva was watching from a car parked a little way off.

In the end, his face went cold.

"The evidence is airtight. What's there to doubt?

"Isabella, don't make me pull a gun on you."

That crushed whatever hope I had left.

When he turned to go, I didn't go after him.

I just went back to the chapel and, right in front of my grandmother, threw the torn marriage contract into the fire.

My sisters-in-law came too.

Sofia brought her children. Teresa had her arms wrapped around her belly. Chiara still had the divorce papers between her fingers, the ink barely dry.

My grandmother asked us one last time, "Do you still believe in them?"

My mother was quiet for a long time. Then she set the cross my father had given her on the table.

"I believed in him for 30 years.

"But betraying the family is the one thing I won't make excuses for."

My grandmother nodded and, in front of all of us, crossed four names out of the family Bible.

Then she reached into the back of the cabinet and took out 12 vials of poison.

The children didn't understand what was happening.

Lucia looked up at her.

"Great-Grandma, is Daddy a bad guy now?"

My grandmother's eyes filled, but she didn't lie to her.

"If he really betrayed the family, then yes."

After that, no one in the chapel said a word.