What a Favor Costs

A missing scene from A Ledger of Betrayal — Christina at nineteen, the wedding where she first told Sal Conti to his face that a favor wasn't a favor at all.

I was nineteen, home from school for my cousin Renata's wedding, wearing a dress my mother had picked out and I'd complained about the whole drive to the hall. It was itchy at the collar and too formal for a reception that would end, as they always did, with somebody's uncle singing badly into a microphone nobody had cleared him to use.

The hall sat two blocks from the bakery, gold trim and a fireplace nobody ever lit, the same kind of room I'd sit in for every wedding and christening and funeral for the rest of my life without ever once questioning why the same handful of families always filled it. I didn't know yet what I was looking at, those first nineteen years. I only knew the room, and that my father moved through it like he owned a piece of every table in it, which, in a manner I wouldn't understand for another decade, he did.

Sal Conti kissed my father's cheek early in the evening, the way he did at every one of these, called him an old friend, and my father called him the same back, warm and unhurried, two men who'd known each other longer than I'd been alive. I'd seen him at a dozen tables like this one over the years and thought nothing more of him than I thought of the fireplace nobody lit. Furniture. Part of the room.

I only noticed him properly that night because of what he said to my father over the antipasto.

"Nino." Sal set a hand on my father's shoulder, warm, familiar, the gesture of a man greeting someone he genuinely liked. "I took care of that permit issue at the shop. The health inspector who kept finding reasons to come back twice a month. He won't be finding reasons anymore."

"I appreciate it, Sal."

"Don't appreciate it. It's nothing. What are friends for."

I don't know what made me say it. I was nineteen, and I'd had one glass of the wine my mother pretended not to notice, and I had the particular fearlessness of a girl who still believed the world operated on the same rules printed in the textbooks she was paying tuition to read.

"That's not nothing, though," I said. "Is it?"

The table went quiet in a way that tables at these events rarely did, not out of shock exactly, more the way a room goes quiet when someone says something true a half-second before anyone's ready for it. My mother's hand found my knee under the tablecloth, light, a warning I felt but didn't yet understand the shape of.

Sal turned to look at me properly, maybe for the first time in my whole life. Up close he had a stillness to him I hadn't clocked from across the room, the kind of quiet that made you feel like you'd already said more than you meant to, even when you'd only said one sentence.

"No?" he said. Not sharp. Almost amused. "Tell me what it is, then, since you seem to have a theory."

I should have stopped there. I didn't.

"It's a favor with interest," I said. "You did something for him that he couldn't easily undo, and now he owes you something he can't easily measure, and neither of you ever has to say that part out loud, because saying it out loud would make it sound like what it actually is." I felt my face go hot the moment the words were fully out of my mouth, the particular horror of hearing yourself finish a sentence you should have abandoned three words in. "I'm sorry. That was rude."

"It wasn't rude." Sal considered me for a long moment, the kind of look I'd later learn to recognize on other faces in other rooms, the look of a man deciding whether to file something away or let it go. "It was accurate. Rude and accurate aren't always the same thing, whatever your mother's taught you about manners."

"I didn't mean—"

"You meant exactly what you said. Don't apologize for a thing you meant." He picked up his wine, unhurried, and looked past me to my father, who hadn't moved, hadn't scolded me, hadn't done anything except watch the exchange with an expression I couldn't read yet and would spend years learning to. "Nino. Your daughter has more nerve than sense."

"She gets the nerve from her mother," my father said, which was the first thing he'd said since I opened my mouth, and it landed soft enough that I understood, even at nineteen, that it wasn't a correction. It was something closer to pride, dressed up as a joke so the whole table could laugh instead of sitting in the silence I'd made.

The table did laugh, on cue, the particular relieved laughter of people grateful for permission to move past a moment that could have gone several other directions. Sal laughed too, though his eyes stayed on me a beat longer than the joke required, the same unhurried attention I wouldn't fully understand until years later, watching a different man across a different table give me that exact look.

"Both will serve her," Sal said, mostly to my father, though I understood even then he meant it for me too. "Nerve gets you noticed. Sense keeps you alive long enough to use it for something. She's got the first part already. We'll see about the second."

The band started up again a few minutes later, some cousin's brother-in-law butchering a song everyone recognized anyway, and the room folded itself back into its ordinary noise, silverware and laughter and someone's toddler shrieking with delight two tables over. I sat very still through the rest of the antipasto, replaying my own sentence in my head, certain I'd find the moment where it had gone wrong and discovering instead that I couldn't find one single word I actually regretted, only the volume at which I'd said it.

Renata found me near the dessert table an hour later, flushed from dancing, and asked what I'd said to Sal Conti to make the whole table go quiet like that.

"I told him a favor wasn't a favor."

She laughed so hard she nearly dropped her cake. "You did not."

"I did."

"Christina. Do you know who that is?"

"He's Papa's friend."

"He's Papa's friend the way the ocean is a swimming pool." She wiped her eyes, still laughing, though something more careful moved behind it now. "You're either the bravest person at this wedding or the only one who doesn't know better yet. I genuinely can't tell which."

I told her I didn't know either, and I meant it, and we let the subject drop the way you let things drop at nineteen, certain there'd be time later to understand whatever you'd just walked past without fully seeing.

I didn't understand, at nineteen, that I'd just been assessed. I thought I'd embarrassed my family at a wedding, said something too clever for the room, and I spent the rest of the night quietly mortified, avoiding my mother's eye, certain I'd hear about it in the car.

I never did hear about it in the car. My mother never mentioned it again, not that night, not in all the years after. I understood much later that she hadn't been warning me to stop talking. She'd been warning me that the room had just started paying attention to me in a way it hadn't before, and that attention, once earned, doesn't un-earn itself.

I forgot about the whole exchange for the better part of a decade. It surfaced only once more, briefly, the week Anthony Delvecchio's auto shop quietly closed, when my father mentioned, almost offhand, that Sal had asked after me. I hadn't understood why a man I'd met exactly once would think of me at all, let alone ask.

I understood it fully only years later, standing in a parking lot outside a medical practice with photographs of my husband's second life on my phone, remembering a girl in an itchy dress who'd told a dangerous man his favor wasn't really a favor, and hadn't flinched when he looked at her like he was deciding what to do with the information.

He'd decided, that night, to remember me. It would take me most of a marriage to understand exactly what that kind of remembering was worth, and exactly how patiently a man like Sal Conti could wait to spend it.

To continue reading the series

-------------------------------------------

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the characters, story, and twists! If so, you might want to give my short book, No Witness for My Cheating Husband, a try. It’s FREE when you sign up to join my email reader club!

My cheating husband needed my notary stamp to fund his mistress.

Too bad I’m the witness he should have feared.

On Tuesday afternoon, I watched an elderly woman sign a power of attorney with a shaking hand. 

On Tuesday night, my husband handed me a felony over steak and red wine.

He called it a favor. A refinance document with his business partner’s signature. One tiny stamp from his notary wife so the deal could close on time.

But I don’t stamp favors.

I witness signatures. I record names. I keep a journal the law already trusts.

At first, I thought my husband was trying to steal from his business partner.

Then I found the money. And the mistress.

He thought I’d be a good wife. He thought I’d look away.

He thought wrong.

For readers who love: cheating husband revenge, mistress-funded fraud, forged documents, wife gathers evidence, notary journal payback, financial betrayal, no reconciliation, and justice served cold.

Download No Witness for My Cheating Husband for free when you click here to join my reader club!