Don’t Call Me Your Donna Anymore

When I was nine months pregnant, the books came to me first.

It arrived the way all dangerous things do in this life — quietly, through a channel meant to look like nothing at all. A skimmed tribute ledger, copied and sent to my private account, the kind of paper that gets men buried in the foundations of buildings they were sworn to protect. My husband, Lorenzo Castellano, capo of his own crew and a made man of the Vitale Family, had been funneling thirty thousand a month to the same woman without fail. The first siphon was dated back two years. Right around the time we lost our first child.