At the Morello family’s Christmas dinner, I stood beside Vincent, waiting for him to announce our engagement.
Instead, in the very next second, he walked in holding a little boy and claimed him as his son.
And the woman he said he was going to marry? Scarlett Morello. The one he had always introduced as his “sister.”
The whole room erupted in applause. I stood there frozen, like a nail hammered into the floor.
Later, in his study, he took my hand and said, “Scarlett is dying. Late-stage breast cancer. She only has six months left. After she’s gone, I’ll marry you.”
But there was no guilt in his eyes. No love, either.
Then he told me to go to his villa that afternoon, to take care of the woman who was supposedly “dying.”
I opened the photo he sent me. Scarlett was lying in a hospital bed, pale-faced, an IV in the back of her hand.
A professional tennis player who had been playing in an exhibition match three weeks ago, and who had dropped three grand at Louis Vuitton on Fifth Avenue just five days ago.
But sure. She was “dying.”
At three in the morning, I was curled up by the front door of my apartment, crying so long I lost track of time.
Then my phone lit up. A text from an unknown number:
[Elena, I’m downstairs. When we were kids, you told me that once I controlled the docks on the East Coast, you’d marry me. The docks are mine now. Does that promise still stand?]
I pulled back the curtain and there he was. Ethan Vitale, my first love, leaning against the door of a black Cadillac, lifting a hand in a lazy wave.
Three years ago, when he left New York, he was only a Capo.
Now, he was the Don of the Vitale family.
He didn’t rush me. Didn’t pressure me to come downstairs.
He came for one reason only, to let me know he was back.
I wiped away my tears and texted back:
[It still stands.]
Because I wanted to see for myself just how long that woman could keep up her act.
