She Promised a Crying Girl Her Dying Puppy Would Live — Then Her Mafia Boss Father Kept Returning at Midnight and Stole Her Heart

Chapter 8

The next morning, he took her to meet his grandmother.

The house was three blocks from the clinic, a narrow brick row-house with a garden that had been coaxed into glory over sixty years. The old woman met them at the door — small, fierce, her silver hair in a braid, her eyes the same dark color as her grandson’s — and she took one look at June and said, in heavily accented English, “So. You are the one who saved the dog.”

“I helped,” June said. “Bruno did the hard part.”

“Hmph.” The grandmother looked at Matteo, then back at June, and nodded once, decisively. “She’s good. You may keep her.”

“Grazie, Nonna,” Matteo said, deadpan.

Inside, the house smelled of bread and rosemary. There were photographs everywhere — a young man who must have been Matteo’s father, a wedding, a baby in a christening gown. The grandmother poured espresso the color of tar and told June stories about Matteo as a boy: the broken arm from the tree he swore he’d climbed for a dare, the first girl he’d brought home who had cried when she met the family, the summer he’d spent feeding strays on the beach against his father’s explicit orders.

“He has always been like this,” the grandmother said, her eyes crinkling. “A hard shell. A soft heart. The shell fools everyone. The heart fools him.” She fixed June with a look. “You see the heart?”

“Yes,” June said. “I see it.”

“Then you are the first.” The old woman patted her hand. “Take care of him. And of that child. And of the dog.” She paused. “Especially the dog. He is the one who brought you here.”

Later, while Matteo made a call in the garden, the grandmother led June down the narrow hallway to a wall of photographs. She stopped in front of a faded one — a young woman with Matteo’s eyes, holding a baby.

“My Elena,” the old woman said. “Gone two years now. Matteo has not spoken of her since. Not to me. Not to anyone.” She looked at June. “But he speaks to you.”

“He doesn’t speak to me either,” June said. “Not really. Not about her.”

“Give him time.” The grandmother’s hand was warm and dry on June’s arm. “The heart is like bread. It cannot be rushed. But it can be tended.” She studied June’s face with a sharpness that saw everything. “You are tired. You are lonely. You hide in your work the way he hides in his walls. You understand each other better than you know.”

That evening, Giulia fell asleep on the couch at the grandmother’s house, Bruno curled at her feet, and Matteo walked June back to the clinic under a sky going violet. At the door, he stopped.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About what you said. About the chair.”

“And?”

“I found something that matters more than the chair.” He looked down at her. “I’m going to get out. For real. Not because it’s easy — it won’t be. But because I want to be ordinary, June. I want to wake up every morning in a house with a garden, and take my daughter to school, and go to work that doesn’t hurt people. I want to be the man you think I can be.”

“I don’t think you can be it,” June said. “I know you already are it. You’ve been him all along — you just had a lot of armor in the way.”

He kissed her again, softer this time, and she could feel the wall inside him cracking, stone by stone.