My Mafia Husband Chose His First Love for Three Nights

I had asked Nina to forward it.

He had finished his sentence five months earlier. I knew where he was living because he had told me, and because, for once, information came without an expectation that I do something with it. A small apartment. A job with a renovation contractor. Regular appointments he kept. Payments toward obligations that would take years to satisfy.

His letters from prison had arrived every few months. Sometimes I read them immediately. Sometimes they sat unopened until a Sunday afternoon. None had asked me to save him from the consequences of his own life.

This one was brief.

Would you be comfortable having coffee with me? You can choose the place. I understand if you’d rather not.

I read it twice, then went downstairs because the lunch delivery had arrived missing half our tomatoes.

That was how my life worked now. Something could shake me, and there would still be a practical problem that needed my attention. I liked having both feet in a world larger than my marriage had been.

Second Table had twenty employees. Several of our earliest trainees had moved into other kitchens, and one sent Rosa a photograph every time his restaurant changed its menu. We kept the pictures on a corkboard near the staff lockers.

I had friends Adrian had never met. I had traveled with Tess. There had been a gentle, unsuccessful attempt at dating a man who wanted to move to Oregon, while I wanted to see what would happen here.

I had lived during the years Adrian was gone.

That evening, I showed Tess the letter.

She read it, returned it, and went back to chopping vegetables.

“Well?” I asked.

“I’m trying very hard not to answer a question you haven’t asked.”

“Do you think I’m making a mistake?”

“You haven’t done anything yet.”

I leaned against her counter.

“I still love parts of him.”

Her knife stopped.

“I know.”

“I hate that you know.”

“Mara, you kept his letters in the drawer with the good stationery. You put overdue bills in a bowl.”

I laughed despite myself.

She put down the knife. “Coffee is coffee. You get to leave afterward.”

I chose a place near the river and drove myself.

Adrian stood when I entered. He looked older in ways photographs had failed to show. There was more gray at his temples and a thin white mark across one knuckle. His coat was ordinary. So was the chair he had saved for me.

“Hi, Mara.”

“Hi.”

He waited until I sat before taking his own seat.

When the server approached, he looked at me instead of ordering what I used to drink.

“Tea,” I said. “With lemon.”

Something almost like a smile touched his mouth. He had always teased me about my coffee habit.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m glad I asked.”

We talked about work first. He described a kitchen renovation where a wall had concealed a problem no one had included in the estimate. I told him about a trainee who could calm an angry customer but panicked whenever the telephone rang.

“Rosa makes him answer it now,” I said.

“Does he hate her?”

“Passionately. He also brings her coffee every morning.”

We both smiled. The ease frightened me a little. I had prepared for tears and explanations. I had not prepared for remembering how much I used to enjoy talking to him.

Then he asked about Second Table’s anniversary dinner.

“How did you know about that?”

His expression changed at once.

“The restaurant newsletter. It’s public. I signed up.”

I looked down at my tea. Of course we had a newsletter. I approved it myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You don’t have to apologize for checking.”

We sat with the awkwardness until it loosened. He did not turn it into evidence that I was being unfair to him.

When an hour had passed, I said I needed to leave.

“Could we do this again?” he asked.

“Let me think about it.”

“All right.”

No flowers arrived the next morning. No message came asking whether I had thought enough. On Thursday, I called him myself.

We met twice more that month.

The fourth time, he was late.

It happened so ordinarily that it almost made the fear worse. We had agreed on lunch. At eleven twenty, my phone rang, and for a second I was back in the dining room with candles burning down.

“The inspection ran over,” he said. “I won’t make noon. I’m sorry. I can get there at one, or we can choose another day.”

I gripped the edge of my desk.

“You promised noon.”

“I did.”

He explained what had happened, briefly. He did not tell me I was unreasonable for being upset, and he did not abandon his work to stage a rescue from a feeling he had helped create.

“One doesn’t work for me,” I said. “I have interviews.”

“Then I’ll see you another day.”

Afterward, I sat very still until Rosa knocked on my door.

“Bad news?”

“No. A change of plans.”

She glanced at my hand, still clenched around the desk.

“Take five minutes. I can start the interviews.”

That night, I told Adrian what the call had brought back. He listened. We arranged another lunch. He arrived when he said he would.

There were dozens of moments like that over the next few months. Small disappointments, honest explanations, plans made again. Trust returned slowly enough that I could watch it happen.

I invited him to the dinner celebrating our newest training graduates. He bought his own ticket and sat where the seating chart placed him, between Tess and the mother of a young woman who had just earned her first management position.

When a server dropped a spoon beside his chair, Adrian picked it up and handed it back. Years earlier, that same server might have shaken simply because of who he was.

Now she thanked him and asked if he wanted more potatoes.

“Yes, please,” he said.

Across the room, Tess caught my eye. She did not smile or signal approval. She went back to her dinner. For the first time, I appreciated that she was allowing me to have an experience without interpreting it for me.

After the speeches, Adrian found me near the kitchen.

“You built a good place,” he said.

“We did.” I nodded toward Rosa and the staff stacking dishes.

He followed my gaze. “You did.”

He left when the other guests left. He did not stay behind to supervise the cleanup or tell people how to lock the doors.

A week later, he called with a different kind of news.

“A man I used to do business with approached me today,” he said.

The old dread arrived before he could finish.

“What did he want?”

“To put me back in a room with people I should never have worked with.”

I sat down on the bottom stair of my apartment building.

“And?”

“I refused. He left. I’ve told my attorney about the contact.”

For a moment, I could hear only a neighbor’s television through the wall.

“Were you tempted?”

He did not answer quickly.

“By the money? Yes. For a second.”

The admission hurt. Then I considered what a polished denial would have done to me later.

“What made you say no?”

“I remember the shop owner in court. And I like going home from work without wondering who will pay for what I did that day.”

“You can’t make me the reason you stay out of that life.”

“You aren’t. If you never see me again, the answer is still no.”

I rested my forehead against the cool stair railing.

“Thank you for telling me.”

We discussed it again in person. He answered the questions I had. There was no missing hour, no second explanation a week later. Gradually, the ordinary days resumed.

One Thursday, I suggested bowling.

“Bowling?” he repeated.

“You have a better idea?”

“Several, but now I’m curious.”

He rented the wrong size shoes and refused to admit it until the second game. I knocked down three pins, celebrated too loudly, and startled a little boy in the next lane. His grandmother showed me how to hold the ball without bending my wrist.

Adrian tried her advice and promptly sent his ball into the gutter.

“You’re thinking too much,” she told him.

“I’ve heard that before.”

I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

Later, eating fries from a paper basket, we argued about whether his first miserable game ought to count because of the shoes.

“They were defective,” he insisted.

“They were shoes.”

“I’m considering an appeal.”

“Denied.”

He stole a fry. I slapped his hand with a napkin, and for the rest of the evening neither of us discussed forgiveness, evidence, or how far we had come. We were simply two people who had discovered that neither should bowl for money.

In the parking lot, I realized I wanted to kiss him.

The thought made me stop beside my car. Adrian stopped too, a careful distance away.

“What is it?”

“I’m trying to decide something.”

He waited while someone maneuvered a minivan out of the space behind us.

Then I stepped closer and touched his face. He searched my eyes, uncertain in a way the man I had first married rarely allowed himself to be.

I kissed him.

He kissed me back gently, one hand resting against my shoulder. When I drew away, he let me.

“I had a good time,” I said.

“So did I.”

“Even with the defective shoes?”

His laugh followed me into the car.

I called Tess on the drive home. She listened to the whole story before asking whether I had remembered to return my bowling shoes. It was such a sisterly question that I laughed all over again.

Near the anniversary of my surgery, he asked whether I would like company.

I almost said I was fine. The answer was so familiar that it reached my mouth before I considered whether it was true.

“Yes,” I told him. “But I don’t want flowers.”

“Okay.”

“Or a speech.”

“Okay.”

We walked beside the river in coats heavy enough to keep the wind out. For a while, we talked about nothing difficult. Then I told him something I had never said before.

“I was angry at the people in the emergency room.”

He turned toward me.

“They were trying to save me. They were kind. But every time someone came through the curtain, I wanted it to be you.”

He swallowed. He kept walking at my pace.

“I know you can’t change it,” I said. “I just needed you to hear it.”

“I hear you.”

At a bench, I sat and cried for a few minutes. He sat beside me. He did not ask whether I could forgive him now that he had suffered too.

When I reached for his hand, he held mine.

We stayed until the wind made my eyes water for another reason, then found somewhere warm to eat soup.

Eight months after our first coffee, I invited him to dinner in my apartment.

I cooked badly. I had been distracted all afternoon, and the chicken came out dry enough that even I could not defend it.

“There’s a pizza place downstairs,” I said.

“I was wondering how politely I could mention it.”

I threw a dish towel at him.

He caught it. We both became quiet for a moment, recognizing the old gesture.

Then he folded the towel and asked what kind of pizza I wanted.

After we ate, I brought out the letter I had written that morning. I had read it enough times to know I meant every word. There was no attorney waiting for my signature, no deadline, and no crisis making the decision for me.