Page 106 of The Bonus

“No.” Dominic gets up and marches upstairs.

“Torna subito qui,” Gabriel calls after him. (“You come back here right now.”)

“No.”

The table falls silent and Lucy stares after him before she finally continues to eat.

Gabriel puts his fork down and I gesture to his bowl. “You need to eat it all.”

“I want to live.”

I exhale heavily, that was a disaster. I should have put arsenic in his food and put us all out of misery.

“Eat. The food.” I smile through gritted teeth. “Don’t make me force-feed you…because…I will.”

Gabriel glares at me and eventually picks up his fork.

My god, that couldn’t have gone worse. Dom is a handful, sometimes too much for even me.

“Lucy, why don’t you take Dom’s dinner up to him.”

“Okay.” Lucy grabs her brother’s bowl and toddles off upstairs.

I wait until she is out of ears’ reach. “What did you say to him in Italian?”

“He was being rude, so I pulled him into line.”

“What?” I screw up my face. “You do not get to pull him into line on the first day of being a father.”

“He doesn’t get to be rude to me on the first day of being my son. Not on day one, not ever. He needs to learn straight away that bad behavior will not be tolerated.”

I slump back into my chair and look around the empty table. “Eat your food.”

“I’m getting you a cook.”

“Why?”

“Because no wonder he’s in a bad mood. The poor bastard is being poisoned to death.” He stirs the food in his bowl. “And for the record, you cut the fucking onions up. Not throw them in whole.”

I glance down at the eyeball pickled onions in his spaghetti and I get the giggles.

“There is nothing funny about your cooking, Grace.”

“Kind of.”

“Not at all,” he snaps.

“Well, you need to eat what I cook the children; it tells them that you are like them.”

“If they like this…” He gestures to his plate as he searches for the right word. “Then we are nothing alike.” He puts his head into his hands and exhales heavily in disappointment.

I watch him for a moment. He really is feeling so out of his depth here. Empathy fills me.

“Dominic is strong-willed.”

He sits for a moment as if processing my words. “I wanted tonight to be nice so that they would remember me fondly.”

“Well, in that case…don’t be yourself.”

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