Page 133 of Last Comes Fate

I looked up at that strong, talented, mercurial, impossibly beautiful husband of mine. Hope and happiness glittered in his sapphire blue eyes, and I knew mine radiated the same emotions right back at him.

“Happy?” he asked as he leaned down to press his lips to mine.

I nodded. “So happy.”

And I meant it.

Because whatever the future held, as duke and duchess, chef and professor, or husband and wife, we’d face it together.

And I, for one, couldn’t wait.

EPILOGUE

Giovanna Emilia Zola—known to her family and friends as Joni—stood outside of the Ambassador Theatre in the heart of New York’s Broadway district. It was only eight o’clock—nowhere near late enough for her sister and brother’s co-baby shower to be winding down back in Belmont. Italians and Puerto Ricans knew how to get down. More than likely, the celebration would still be going by the time she got home, well after anyone expecting babies or older than eighty decided to retire for the night.

Normally, Joni wasn’t the type to skip out on any kind of party. She was more the dance-on-tables, sing-karaoke-’til-three, make-out-on-the-terrace-’til-five type. The one-everyone-stuck-around-to-see-what-she-would-do type.

Normally, she thrived on that kind of attention. Tonight, though, she just couldn’t stand it.

Yes, part of it was finding out literally the morning before the guests started arriving that her grandmother was moving to Italy for a year and renting out the house while she was gone, giving Joni exactly two weeks to pack up her world of twenty-four years in that house and find somewhere to live.

But it wasn’t just that.

It was the joy on her sister’s face when her giant hulk of a husband fed her a forkful of the too-sweet cake from Gino’s.

It was the way her brother grinned, giddy with excitement, at Nina’s giant belly whenever he thought she wasn’t watching him.

It was the fact that even Nonna, an almost eighty-year-old widow who hadn’t traveled so far as Yonkers in the last fifty years, was stepping out for an adventure of her own and probably getting laid to boot.

Everyone had something.

And Joni had nothing but a bum knee, a GED, and a body most men liked to look at but had never once talked about marrying.

She found herself standing outside the Ambassador Theatre, tall and brown with the banners forChicagotoppling down its sides, displaying its dancers with their fish-netted legs and red lips and sexpot looks for days. The choreography was famous, just like almost any show done by the great Bob Fosse. You couldn’t watch these dancers with their sultry, sinuous moves and not want to be them.

And she’d almost done it. God, she’d been so close. Two days from accomplishing the dream she’d had since she was seven years old and her second-grade class got to seeCatsright before it left Broadway. It was a bonkers musical, just one random song after another while these people dressed up like freaking kitties had danced all over the stage, hung like acrobats, even swayed their way up and down the aisles. She hadn’t had the slightest idea what was happening. All she knew was that she wanted to be right there. On that stage. With those people.

And everyone’s eyes on her.

At the time, she’d been a mediocre student in a weekly ballet class at the Belmont community center. But from that point onward, she became the star, to the point where Ms. Velasquez told Nonna within a year that Joni had real promise and helped get her a scholarship to a serious dance studio downtown.

Dance was the only thing she’d ever been able to focus on. It was there when she couldn’t pass the tenth grade. It was there when she couldn’t hold on to any other jobs. It was there always, the only dream she’d ever had, existing right here on these very streets, in theaters like this, giving her hope she could really be something in this life.

Until it all ended just six months ago, days before she was supposed to dance on Broadway right here. In this very show.

They’d taken her name and pictures off the outside display the day after she’d screwed up her knee. She only knew because Kayla, the company member who was taking her place, had posted a picture of it on her Instagram stories with a bunch of heart emojis and the wordsOMG MY BROADWAY DEBUT!!!in giant red letters that matched theChicagologo.

Joni turned, but instead of walking in the direction of Times Square, toward lights and people and, most importantly, the subway stations that would carry her back home to the Bronx, she walked west toward Hell’s Kitchen, until she found herself on Eighth Avenue, where cars rushed past the odd, twenty-four-hour mix of theaters, tourist shops, and the last remnants of the peepshows and strip clubs that used to take up most of this part of town well before she’d been born.

“Hey, sweetheart! Need a lift?” shouted a guy from a beat-up Acura zooming past while it blared old-school Run-DMC from the stereo.

The others with him hooted and whistled, like she was no better than the sex workers who used to walk this corner back in the day.

“To your mother’s house!” she called, swinging a hand toward the car like she wanted to give the guy the finger. It was the same half-gesture she’d learned from her grandmother and her aunties and however many other women all over the Bronx who did the exact same thing to any no-good asshole who yelled things at strange women on a Saturday night.

But the car had long disappeared with the flow of traffic under the city lights. And when Joni stopped staring in the direction it had gone, she turned and found herself looking up at a sign, lit up just like one of the marquees on Broadway, except this one had silhouettes of naked girls and a cat wearing a top hat on the front holding a stack of dollar bills.

Funny what a difference a block makes.

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