Chapter 8: What He Told Me Over Dinner
He chose a small Italian restaurant on the North Side, the kind with no sign above the door and candles in wine bottles.
The owner greeted Giovanni by name and led us to a corner table without being asked.
I ordered water.
Giovanni ordered wine and then looked at me and said, "Is that all right?" and when I said yes he looked relieved in a way I hadn't expected.
We talked about the case first.
Safe ground.
The appeal timeline, the trustee process, what Edmund had said on the courthouse steps before his daughter wheeled him to the car.
Then the food came and the conversation slowed and Giovanni set down his fork and said, "You asked me a question on the steps today."
"You said you'd answer it at dinner."
"I did." He turned his wine glass once.
"My grandfather told me about your father when I was nineteen.
Not the name — he never said the name.
But the story.
A young man on a loading dock who gave him forty dollars and a warm room and asked for nothing." He paused.
"I grew up with that story.
It was the one my grandfather told when he wanted to explain why he built the company the way he did.
Why he paid his workers above rate.
Why he never forgot a debt."
I watched him.
"When I arrived at the wedding and heard your surname mentioned at the table, I thought it was coincidence.
Then I heard your first name and your father's name and I knew it wasn't." He looked up.
"I wasn't doing you a favor, Jessica.
I was doing what my grandfather would have done.
I was making sure the right person didn't get pushed to a table by the kitchen and left alone."
I set down my fork.
"You knew who I was before you walked over."
"Yes."
"You knew about the will."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you just tell me?"
"Because you would have thought it was about the money." He held my gaze.
"And it wasn't.
It isn't."
The candle between us flickered.
"Your grandfather sounds like he was a remarkable man," I said.
"He was difficult and demanding and he expected too much of everyone around him." Giovanni paused.
"But he never forgot a kindness.
In sixty years of business, that was the one thing that never changed."
We stayed at that table for two hours.
He told me about building his own company in Milan, separate from the family estate, because he had wanted to know if he could do it without the name.
He had.
He told me about coming back to Chicago eighteen months ago when his grandfather's health declined.
He told me about sitting at Aurelio's bedside in the last weeks, listening to the old man talk about things he had never said out loud before — debts, regrets, people he wished he had found sooner.
I told him about nursing school, about the night Lily was born with no one in the waiting room, about the first time Lily called me Mama and I had stood in the kitchen of my one-bedroom apartment and cried into a dish towel because there was no one there to tell.
He listened the way people listen when they are not waiting for their turn to speak.
When we stepped outside, the night air was cool and the street was quiet.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Yes."
"The countdown.
Seven, eight, nine, ten." I looked at him.
"Did you actually have a plan if I said no?"
He considered this seriously.
"No," he said.
I laughed.
A real one, the kind that surprised me on the way out.
He smiled then — fully, for the first time — and it changed his face entirely.
We stood on the sidewalk for a moment neither of us rushed to end.
"Lily has a school thing on Saturday," I said.
"A small performance.
She's been practicing a song for three weeks.
She sings it constantly." I paused.
"My father is coming.
It's not — it's just a small thing."
Giovanni looked at me.
"I'd like to come," he said.
"If that's all right."
"It's all right," I said.
May you like
I walked to my car.
I didn't look back, but I was smiling before I reached the door.
