Page 74 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

I tell myself Ren isn’t a romantic, but I am, and the only thing worse than being a romantic is also being agullibleromantic. And I guess I’m that, too, because the thought of Ren giving us the only wedding we might ever have puts a firm gag on my complaints.

My eyelids flutter as I try to piece together what that means. Why it would be important to him? He didn’t saybefore I make you my wife. He saidwithout becoming your husband.

For the first time, I look at Ren and think—maybe he doesn’t hate me after all.

Maybe it’s something worse, that same awful emotion that I feel for him.

Love.

***

The sky is still a gray slab sitting over us, as if the skyscrapers are the pillars holding it up, turning New York into one big parking garage that we are trying to escape.

The landscape changes outside the window, trading asphalt-gray buildings for asphalt-gray sky and long stretches of highway. Ren warned me it would be a long drive. I surrendered my phone to Harper and let her erode a little of her attention span. I wonder about Sincere. Elijah. Anything to keep my thoughts offthe perfect, white gown spilling all over the leather seats and the tremor in my heart.

It reminds me of the sounds Harper’s heart made during the sonograms.Ba-ba-BUM, ba-ba-BUM. Fluttery and fast.

I can’t stop thinking about thewhybehind all this.

“Does a wedding really matter, Ren?” I ask once I am well and truly lost on the twisting roads we travel, “Or is this just for you?”

He doesn’t tell me.

We arrive at our wedding venue. The car passes through a wrought iron fence and onto a lick of gravel road. Hills of trimmed, dry grass stretch out before us, with rows and rows of hunched stones jutting from the uneven ground. A cemetery. An old one, judging from the small gravestones crumbling at the crux of the nearest hill, their names and forms lost to time. Others are fresh, lined with thick, fake flowers and plastic flags and scarred dirt. Some families are tucked away in their own mausoleums, sequestered from the impoverished dead in the ground. Rotting in the dirt is so low class, after all. Their family sigils are stamped on thin, wiry gates. The designer-branded dead.

The car stops. A man in black waits for us. At a glance, I could mistake him for an old-school gravedigger, but the white square on his collar corrects my assumption.

Harper piles out, all energy and eager to stretch her legs. She rushes to one of the nearest graves, practicing her letters as she tries to read it.

I step from the car and take a sweeping look at our surroundings. Dark, glum weather, humid, stagnant air, and a bunch of dead people.

“This is why women do the wedding planning,” I mutter under my breath.

I swear, for a moment, I almost catch Ren smiling.

They gather my dress and train so that it doesn’t drag on the ground. I am taken before the Caruso family crypt. Ren’s parents—whatever parts of them didn’t burn—are held here. I can’t bring myself to look at the tombs as we stand before them, like those bodies might jump out, all charred bones, and scream at me and shake me and demand to know why they deserved to die.

I don’t know why. Why would I know? I was seventeen. But I still can’t look at them.

There is no ceremony.

I am dragged before Ren’s parents as if to sayThis is why you deserve this. The dead are the only “family” in attendance to our union besides Harper. The driver is our only legally binding witness, unsmiling and serious, as he folds his hands in front of him.

“Are we waiting for anyone else?” the priest asks.

“This is all.”

As Ren and I stand together before the holy man, I feel an immense silence stretching around us. The people who should be there. My own family. His. When I had grown out of my brattyteenage years, I finally realized that going out shopping with my mother was not the karmic torture I’d once thought it was at thirteen. She’d sometimes point out dresses that would suit a mother of the bride, and would tease me by asking if I’d let her wear it to my wedding one day. She was so convinced I was going to have a big, happy wedding. Emphasis on both the big and the happy. She had a saying: “A father should cry twice for his daughter’s wedding—once when he sees her walk down the aisle, and once when he gets the bill.” She loved a good party.

A cold wind shivers against the back of my neck.

The dead have been planted all across the hills, scattered like fruitless seeds that will never sprout, and stretching as far as I can see to the tree line. This is the audience we have. The audience we deserve. My gutted childhood dream finally come true: I’m marrying Ren.

The priest cracks open a leathery bible, and I almost laugh at the absurdity of it. The stretch of my cheeks makes me aware of the tears already drying on my face and the way they feel crinkly and stiff. Not tears of joy. Not by a long shot.

Ren stares right at me. My tears and my silent devastation. I am right where I daydreamed about being—across the aisle from him.

“Do either of you have vows you’d like to read?” the priest asks.

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