The Don's Replacement Bride

The dress had been made for a woman two inches taller than me.

I knew because I'd watched Bianca stand on a stool in this same room three weeks ago while a seamstress from Taylor Street pinned the hem around her ankles. Bianca had laughed the whole time. She'd said the Vitales could buy her a dress, but they couldn't make her like the groom, and the seamstress had crossed herself and pretended not to hear.

Now the same seamstress knelt at my feet with a mouthful of pins, folding two inches of silk under itself, and she wouldn't look at my face.

"Hold still, Giulia," my father said from the doorway.

I had been holding still for forty minutes. I'd been holding still since six that morning, when he came into my room without knocking, sat on the edge of my bed and told me my sister was gone.

"Gone where?" I'd asked, half asleep.

"With a man." He said it to the window. "Some nobody. She left a note."

"Show me the note."

"I burned it."

That should have been the first warning. My father never burned anything. He kept receipts from 1998 in shoeboxes under the stairs. He kept my mother's hospital bracelets, the stubs from every Cubs game he'd won money on, the letter from Loyola that said I'd gotten in. A man like that does not burn the last words his daughter left him.

But at six in the morning, with his hand heavy on my knee, I only heard the next part.

"The wedding is at two. The Vitales don't know yet, and they're not going to."

I laughed. I actually laughed, because I thought he meant we would call it off quietly, with flowers and apologies and a check. Then I saw his face.

"The Table made a ruling," he said. "A Ferraro bride at the altar on the thirty-first, or Lorenzo Vitale gets to answer for what Paolo did any way he likes. You know what that means. Paolo first. Then me. Then whoever is standing next to me." His eyes moved to the wall between my room and my mother's. "You understand?"

"Dad."

"You're the same size, near enough. Same hair. Under that veil, nobody will know until it's done."

"He'll know."

"By then you'll be his wife, and a wife is a wife. The Table won't care which one."

That was how my father said it. Which one. As if Bianca and I were two bottles of the same wine, and if one had cracked in the cellar, you served the other and smiled.

The seamstress tugged the hem. A pin went into my ankle and I didn't move.

My mother sat on the bed behind me with her rosary wound through her fingers. She hadn't said a word all morning. When I turned my head to look at her, she lowered her eyes to the carpet, and my stomach went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the dress.

"Did you know?" I asked her.

The beads clicked. Nothing else.

"Mom. Did you know she was going to leave?"

"Donatella, go and get the veil," my father said, and she went.

I picked up my phone from the vanity and called Bianca for the eleventh time. Straight to voicemail. Her recorded voice, bright and careless: You know what to do. I didn't. I had never once in my life known what to do without her telling me first.

"Put that down," my father said.

"She'd have told me. If there was a man, she'd have told me."

"Your sister told you what she wanted you to hear. Same as everyone." He crossed the room and took the phone out of my hand, gently, the way you take something sharp from a child. "Two o'clock, Giulia. After that, you can hate me as long as you want."

He slipped my phone into his jacket pocket and walked out.

* * *

Holy Name Cathedral was full by a quarter to two.

I knew it from the sound before I saw it, standing in the vestibule behind the carved doors: three hundred people in their best wool and silk, murmuring under the organ, waiting for a bride who was somewhere I couldn't reach. The Vitale side would fill every pew to the right. The Ferraro side would be thinner. It had been thinner for fourteen years.

The veil was Bianca's choice, Venetian lace so dense I could see shapes through it but not faces. She had picked it because it photographed well. My father had kept it because it hid me.

He offered his arm. His hand was damp through his sleeve.

"Chin up," he said. "Small steps. Don't look at anyone."

"Who is going to look at me? They think I'm her."

"Then walk like her."

I didn't know how. Bianca walked into a room as if it had been waiting for her. I walked into rooms looking for the exits and the nearest place to set down whatever I was carrying. Four years of nursing school had only made it worse. I noticed who was pale, who was sweating, which hand someone favored. I noticed that my father's breathing was too fast and that the usher on the left had a holster under his jacket.

The doors opened. The organ swelled into the processional, and every head in the cathedral turned toward us.

I walked.

The aisle was long. Longer than it had looked at the rehearsal, when I'd stood off to one side holding Bianca's bag while she practiced and teased the priest. Through the lace the candles blurred into gold. Faces came and went: the Greco family in the third row, the old Don with his cane between his knees; a dark-haired young woman beside him, watching with interest. Women in black lace on the Vitale side. Men with flat, patient eyes.

At the altar stood three of them.

The priest, round and nervous. An older man with silver at his temples and a kind face, the best man, smiling at me as if I were a favorite niece. And between them, the groom.

I had seen Lorenzo Vitale twice before. Once at a funeral when I was nineteen, standing at the back of a church with his hands folded, and once on the cover of the Tribune business section, cutting a ribbon on a building he'd bought. He looked the same now as he had both times. Tall. Very still. A black suit that fit him the way armor fits a statue. He didn't turn to watch me come down the aisle. He looked straight ahead at the crucifix, as if the bride were a formality he'd been told to sit through.

Good, I thought. Keep looking at the cross.

We reached the front. My father lifted my hand from his arm and placed it in Lorenzo Vitale's.

His fingers were warm and dry. They closed over mine, and stopped.

I felt it happen. A small pause, a pressure of his thumb across the backs of my fingers, along my short, square nails. Bianca had worn almond-shaped acrylics since she was sixteen, painted a shade of red she called expensive. I had nursing hands. Clean, blunt, nothing on them.

My father stepped back to the front pew. I heard him sit down too hard.

The priest opened his book. "Dearly beloved—"

"Father." Lorenzo's voice was low and even, and the priest stopped as if someone had put a hand over his mouth. "Give us a moment."

A ripple went through the front rows. The man with the silver temples leaned in, still smiling, and murmured something in Italian I didn't catch.

Lorenzo ignored him. He turned toward me for the first time. Up close his eyes were darker than the photographs, almost black, and there was nothing in them I could read except attention, the total, frightening kind.

He lifted the edge of my veil with two fingers and folded it back over my hair.

The candlelight hit my face. Somewhere behind me, a woman drew in a sharp breath. I heard my father's shoes scrape against the marble.

Lorenzo Vitale studied me for a long, silent moment, the wrong sister in the right dress, in front of three hundred witnesses and God. Then he bent his head until his mouth was beside my ear, so close that no one else in the cathedral could hear.

"Where," he said softly, "is your sister?"

I didn't answer him. I couldn't have if I'd tried.

My throat had closed the way it did during my first code in the ICU, when the monitor flatlined and my hands knew what to do long before my head caught up. Only this time my hands didn't know anything. They hung at my sides in Bianca's gloves.

Lorenzo straightened. He kept my veil folded back, so the whole cathedral could see me, and looked past my shoulder at the front pew.

"Carlo," he said. Not loudly. He didn't need to.

My father stood up halfway, then sat back down. "Don Vitale. Bianca has, ah. Bianca is unwell. Giulia is honored to—"

"Is she?"

The silence that followed had a texture. Three hundred people stopped breathing in order to listen better.

The kind-faced best man put a hand on Lorenzo's arm. "Enzo." He kept his voice low, and this time I caught the rest. "Not here. The Table is watching. Finish it and deal with Carlo later."

For a heartbeat I thought Lorenzo would turn ar