Chapter 2

Early the next morning, Leo came to take me back to my family's old house.

A brown paper bag sat on the passenger seat.

"Cherry pie from that old place in Manhattan. It's still warm."

Three years ago, on the day he boarded the boat and was dumped at sea, he'd bought cherry pie too.

The wind on the dock was freezing that day. I clung to the hem of his trench coat, crying, begging him not to get on that boat.

Leo sighed and pulled me into his arms.

He broke the last piece of cherry pie in two, fed me one half, and ate the other himself.

"Like this. One half each. We'll never be apart."

My eyes were red when I asked, "What if you don't come back?"

He buttoned up my coat for me, smiled, and kissed the tip of my nose.

"Once I pull off this job, I'll buy you a whole bakery."

I waited three days for him.

On the third night, what came back wasn't cherry pie.

It was his lighter, fished up from the bottom of the sea, its case covered in scratches from the anchor chain.

I sat up until dawn clutching that lighter, rubbing my thumb over the cracked metal again and again.

Ryan said the fish had gotten to his body.

My mother said the water out there was cold, and they hadn't recovered so much as one whole bone.

After that, the sight of a red cherry made my stomach turn.

Now here Leo was, sitting across from me.

He had a new scar through one eyebrow and calluses between his thumb and forefinger from gripping a gun.

The man I'd thought was rotting at the bottom of the sea still remembered that I liked my cherry pie warm.

He handed me the paper bag.

"Ada, these three years have been hard on you."

I looked down and didn't answer.

So he went on, "Once the funeral's over tomorrow, everything will be back on track."

Everyone back in their old places.

He'd still be the youngest, most promising capo in the Morelli family.

Victor would no longer have to bear the shame of stealing the fiancée of one of his own men.

My mother and brother could hold their heads high again, free from whispers that they'd sold me to get ahead.

They could all turn the clock back three years and pretend the whole farce had been a dream.

Everyone except me. I'd been ground to pieces, and nobody could put me back together.

The black sedan slid silently into the alley behind the old house.

My mother hurried out the back door wrapped in a shawl and pulled me into her arms, tears streaming down her face.

"Look how thin you've gotten. I hardly recognize you.

"Didn't anyone at that estate take care of you?"

She held my face and turned it this way and that. Then, in a panic, she pulled my sunglasses back down over my eyes.

"Inside, quick. Don't let the neighbors or anyone watching the house see you."

My bedroom upstairs looked exactly the way it had when I left three years ago.

The novel I never finished still sat on the nightstand. My favorite perfume was still on the vanity.

My mother brushed my long hair with an ivory comb and had the maid bring up the cream of mushroom soup I'd been eating since I was little.

"You've always been my delicate one.

"Every time something upset you, you wouldn't go to sleep until you'd had a bowl of my soup."

Her voice caught, and she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

I watched my loving mother in the vanity mirror, my eyes stinging again.

For a moment, I could have believed the last three years of hell were nothing but a bad dream.

Leo had never gone into the sea, and I had never become Victor's caged pet.

I was still my family's darling youngest daughter, the one who could run back to my mother whenever the world was cruel.

But before my spoon even touched my lips, Ryan directed a few burly men as they carried in a pure white coffin.

It landed on the rug with a heavy thud. The sharp smell of embalming fluid smothered the creamy scent of the soup.

Ryan patted the gold trim on the coffin and said casually, "We were short on time, so we had to buy one off the shelf. Hop in and see if it fits.

"If it's tight, I'll get a carpenter to plane it wider tonight."

One second my mother was fretting over how thin I'd gotten. The next, she'd pulled a black lace burial dress out of the wardrobe and was holding it up against me.

"The waist looks a little too tight."

Ryan made a face.

"Tight shows off her figure. Once she's lying down, who's going to notice?"

Leo came over and helped me lie down in the coffin. He even adjusted the pillow for me, as thoughtful as ever.

"Don't be scared. It's just a nap. Ten hours will fly by.

"Once you're past the city limits, I'll let you out myself."

The coffin was lined with a thick blanket, and there were air holes in the sides.

They'd planned it all so carefully. They must have rehearsed it behind my back a hundred times.

When I sat up, my elbow knocked over a metal storage box by the fireplace.

The lid sprang open. Neatly bundled stacks of bonds and yellowed envelopes spilled across the floor.

My mother went white and threw herself at the papers to cover them.

"Ada, don't look."

But I'd already recognized the handwriting.

It was Leo's.

The earliest one was postmarked seven days after he was "dumped at sea."

In it, he wrote that he'd gained access to a network of Interpol informants and that the family shouldn't worry about him.

Every letter after that came with a fat stack of Swiss bearer bonds.

And in every one, he asked about me.

Ryan had written back that I'd fainted at the cemetery four times and cried until I coughed up blood.

My mother had written back that Victor had taken me to his estate, that I'd cut my wrists with broken glass at first, but that I was finally willing to take some broth.

I gripped the letter so hard my nails dug into my palm.

"You... knew he was alive the whole time?"

My mother turned her back on me, wiping her eyes.

"Sweetheart, it was for the whole family. We couldn't tell you."

"Why not?"

Ryan lit a cigar beside her, his face dark.

"It was top secret. You've never been able to lie, not since you were a kid. If you'd known, Victor's act would've fallen apart. How else would the five families ever believe Leo had really turned traitor?"

I looked around the room at the people closest to me in the world.

The mother who'd given birth to me and raised me. The brother who'd looked out for me for over 20 years. The fiancé who'd promised to take care of me for the rest of my life.

Even the old butler who served the tea had known about this enormous con.

So this so-called deadly secret was something the whole world knew.

Everyone but me.

Because my tears had to be real and my hate had to be real. Only then would the show be convincing enough to fool even Interpol.

Leo bent down, picked up the box of cherry pie, and pushed it into my ice-cold arms.

"Don't blame them.

"Eighteen rats got caught. Our guys from four whole blocks didn't die for nothing.

"Because of this act, the Morelli family took over three docks on the East Coast and laundered tens of billions of dollars.

"Every tear you cried over the past three years was worth it. You did the family a huge service.

"Besides, the Don didn't just let you live. He's giving you a fortune to retire on. You should be grateful."

He said it with such righteous conviction.

As if making a scene now would make me the selfish one, the sinner who'd ruined the Morelli family's future.

I looked down at the box of cherry pie in my arms and breathed in its sickly sweet smell.

Three years ago, he'd fed me a cherry and told me to wait for him to come back and buy me a whole bakery.

Instead, I got his bloodstained bulletproof vest. I got Victor dragging me away by force. I got countless nights of shame, until I finally fell in love with him.

Now he was back, with a box of cherry pie three years too late.

But he hadn't come to marry me.

He'd come to measure me for my coffin.