All Chapters of Married to my Fiancé Uncle: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

ELENA POVWe held the gathering in the long dining hall where Damien had once answered questions about his staged death, and I thought, standing in the doorway before the guests arrived, about how differently the room felt now. The table was the same dark wood. The chairs were the same. But the careful tension that had hung in the air that first night had been replaced by something looser and more familiar, the sense of a room full of people who had survived a great deal together and knew each other too well to pretend.I'd spent two weeks preparing. The plan sat in front of each place setting in a slim bound folder, my numbers on the left page and Damien's plain language on the right, and I'd rehearsed my part so many times that I could have recited it in my sleep. Damien had offered to speak first. I'd suggested, gently, that we speak together."Thank you all for coming," he said, once the plates had been cleared. "I've asked you here to talk about the next twenty years, not th

ELENA POVThe Carolina Rossi Foundation opened its doors in a plain, two-story building a few blocks from the harbor, with no sign out front except a small brass plate by the entrance that Damien had insisted on paying for himself. Inside, there was a reception desk, six classrooms, a quiet room with a coffee machine and a shelf of donated paperbacks, and a corkboard in the hall that, by the end of the first week, had already begun to fill with handwritten notes. Need a ride to my GED test on Thursday. Anyone know a good electrician? Looking for a roommate near the bus line.I hadn't expected it to grow so fast. We'd announced it quietly, through Beatrice and Antonio and a few of the older families, and I'd imagined perhaps a dozen people drifting in over the first month. By the end of the second week, we had sixty-three names on the intake list, men and women who had spent years carrying boxes, driving cars, and standing outside doors, and who had never once been asked what els

ELENA POVLuca named the restaurant Vincenzo's, and he did not tell Salvatore until the sign went up. I was standing on the pavement with Beatrice when the old man came round the corner on the first morning of the unveiling, leaning on his cane, and stopped dead beneath the freshly painted letters. He stood there for a very long time. Beatrice reached for my hand and gripped it hard, and neither of us breathed.Then Salvatore took off his hat, and held it against his chest, and said nothing at all.Opening night was a Thursday in November, cold and clear, with the first real frost of the season silvering the rooftops. By seven o'clock the street outside was lined with cars. Inside, the old tin ceiling had been cleaned and lit from below, the long mahogany bar polished to a deep, glowing red, and the booths along the wall reupholstered in dark green leather that somehow made the room look both older and newer than it had been. In the back, behind swinging doors, a kitchen roared a

ELENA POVThe foundation held its first graduation in June, in the big classroom on the ground floor, with folding chairs borrowed from the church down the street and a banner Carolina had painted herself. It read CONGRATULATIONS in purple, with a dragon in one corner that appeared to be eating the second N. Daniel had asked if we might take it down. Carolina had looked at him with such wounded dignity that it was still hanging at the start of the ceremony.There were fourteen graduates that year, a mixture of men and women between twenty-four and sixty-one, who had each, over the course of eighteen months, passed their equivalency exams and received the small, plain certificate that so many of them had never imagined holding. I stood at the back of the room with Marianne on my hip, watching them file in wearing their best clothes, some in ill-fitting suits, some in dresses with the creases still showing from the box. Their families filled every chair.Enzo came in near the end o

ELENA POVMy father came home from the hospital to the estate rather than to his own small house, over his loud and entirely theatrical objections. Damien had simply arranged it. By the time the doctors discharged him, the green guest room at the end of the east wing had been aired, the bed made up with the softest sheets we owned, a pill organizer installed on the nightstand, and a cane stand placed by the door, because Carolina had decided that a cane was an important accessory for grandfathers."I am perfectly capable of managing at home," my father said, from the wheelchair the hospital insisted on, glaring at the great front doors of the house like a man being delivered to a stately and rather intimidating prison."Of course you are," Damien said pleasantly, wheeling him up the ramp. "This is only for a few weeks. Until the doctor says.""I know what that means.""I certainly hope so," said Damien. "I've been practicing."The girls took charge of him immediately. Carolina ap