Page 38 of One Filthy Kiss

While we eat, we talk about Elisabetta and my parents, an unofficial celebration of their lives. Happy memories.

“I remember when Elisabetta brought home a stray kitten.” Her mom smiles fondly. “She said that the kitten had followed her home, that it had adopted her as its new mom. It was a straggly thing. Oh, and the fleas. But Elisabetta bathed it all by herself and spent hours picking the fleas off the poor creature’s belly.”

I swallow a mouthful of wine. Even the wine tastes different here. I could buy the same bottle in New York, and it wouldn’t fill me with the sense of satisfaction that I get from drinking it here on a veranda with the sea in the distance and the warm breeze on my cheeks.

“Did the kitten grow up to be Preziosa?” I set the wine glass down on the table and sit back contentedly.

Caterina grins. “You remember.”

“She never let that cat out of her sight,” Emiliano says. “How could Giovanni possibly forget?”

He’s right. The cat slept on Elisabetta’s bed. She licked cream from Elisabetta’s plate. She would curl her tail around our school assignments when we were working together on this veranda, reminding us that she needed attention.

“I never knew that was how she found the cat.”

I’d believed that I knew everything there was to know about Elisabetta, but now I wonder what else I never got a chance to find out about her. Her life was cut too short. She deserved better. She deserved better than me, although she would’ve argued this point until she was hoarse.

I still remember the way her face would light up whenever she looked at me as though the sun was bursting at the seams to get out. That kind of adoration is precious and all too rare. When you know that you are the center of someone’s universe, it makes you feel like you are floating on air.

Like you are immortal.

I only hope that Elisabetta saw the same light in me whenever I looked at her. I failed her by not traveling to Sicily to help with the wedding plans, I cannot bear the weight of knowing that I failed her in love also. Had our wedding gone ahead as planned, I would’ve cherished her, protected her, given her all that her heart desired, but would she have claimed the whole of my heart?

I guess that is something that I will never know.

When we are finished eating, their housekeeper clears the dishes and Caterina leaves Emiliano and me to talk over a bottle of brandy and a pitcher of iced water.

I decline a cigar.

Emiliano lights up and puffs on the end of the cigar, the aroma reminding me of my father when he used to sit outside our family home at night and watch the sunset.

“It is good to see you, Giovanni.” He releases a stream of dirty-brown smoke into the sky and examines the cigar in his hand. “But you did not come all this way to reminisce with an old man.”

“You are not an old man.” He knows this, but the don still commands respect, and I will never stop paying it.

He smiles. “I am one of the lucky ones.”

He is still alive when many people he has known over the years are not. Including his own daughter.

“I have attended far too many funerals.”

I sip my brandy. It is a consequence of being in the mafia. It is something that we all learn to accept from a young age, but it doesn’t mean that it is easier for us to handle than it is for anyone else.

“Do you have news?” He cuts straight to the chase.

“Not exactly. I have a question if I may.”

He sucks on the end of his cigar and gestures for me to proceed.

“2009. You attended a charity event with my parents in London. Do you remember?”

He stares out across his olive grove, and I wonder what he is thinking.

When someone loses a child, how do they think about anything else? How do they move on, walk through life as if the path behind them didn’t get carved up by grief? Don Emiliano Calderone was a formidable man and a powerful ally to my family, but he retired younger than most with no heir to inherit the family business; that honor went to his brother Edoardo, a man about whom I know very little.

“Go on.”

“Someone recently came into my life. A woman.”