The room was utterly still.
Olimpo lifted his head, looked at Tonio, decided nothing required him, and put his head back down.
I stood up.
“I want to say something,” I said, “and I want all of you to hear me say it.”
Dante folded his hands.
“I am going to ask her to marry me.”
Well, fuck. I hadn’t even known I was going to say that.
Marco’s eyebrows went up half a millimetre. Tonio’s face broke into something he could not quite control and then composed. Santo’s expression did not change at all, which from Santo was an expression. Sal kept his hands on the table and kept his eyes on the wood.
Angela, at my right hand, did not look up at me. She kept her face forward, toward Dante, and she sat very still.
“Not now,” I said. “Not here. I will not propose to her in a kitchen during a sit-down. She deserves better than that and I deserve better than that. But you should know. You should know now, before you go any further in any conversation about her, what my intentions are. And you should know what she is to me.”
I did not look at her. I made myself not look at her. I looked at Dante.
“She is not an asset,” I said. “She is not a problem to be managed. She is not the variable in an operation. She ismine. Everything you do at this table from this morning onward, you do knowing that. Everything you ask of me, you ask knowing that. Everything you ask of her, you ask the way you would ask Gemma or Cora or Serafina. If any of you ever propose to use her in a way you would not use the three women your brothers have married, I will leave this family. I will take her with me. I will not be loud about it. I will not make a problem. I will simply be gone, and Don Arturo will hear my reasons from me directly, and you will explain the rest to him yourselves.”
I let that sit.
“Are we clear?”
Dante looked at me. He looked at Angela. He looked at his brothers and at his cousin Sal and then he looked at me again.
“We are clear,” he said. Quiet. Final. The way Dante closed a file. “Pietro. Sit down.”
I sat down.
Angela’s hand found my thigh again under the table. This time it gripped. Once. Hard. Then released. She did not turn her head. She did not look at me. She kept her eyes on the head of the table, and on the man at the head of it, and her chin was up the way it had been since we’d walked in.
Sal lifted his head, finally.
He looked at me across the table. His jaw was already starting to colour at the hinge. His eyes were tired in a way I had never seen on him.
“Cousin,” he said. “I am sorry.”
Angela had been silent for all of it.
She made a sound now. The smallest sound. A breath in.
Then she stood up.
She pushed her chair back a careful inch and stood up, and the room registered the movement the way a room registers any movement made by a woman who has been silent for ninety minutes. Every head turned. Tonio’s, Marco’s, Santo’s, Sal’s. Dante’s, last, because Dante always moved last.
“I would like to say something, if I can?”
“Speak,” Dante said.
“I have been listening,” she said.
Her voice was low and even.
“You have a plan that uses me as bait. The plan was good. I can see, even from across the table, that the plan was good. The crew is professional, the routing is clean, the window is short, and your surveillance is competent. I am sorry that it is broken. I am not sorry that Pietro told me. Those two facts can both be true.”
