The nanny kept the don's heir a secret for five months — until the mafia boss discovered the ultrasound

Chapter 25: The Baptism

They baptised him at six weeks old, in the cathedral in Providence, on a bright morning in front of God and both families and — this time — the photographers.

That was the point of it, and everyone understood the point, which was what made it more than a christening. For five months the child had been a secret: hidden in a cardigan, in a false name, in the pages of a storybook, argued over in locked rooms by men deciding what he was worth and to whom he could be shown. The baptism was the opposite of all of that, conducted in public, at full volume, in white. It was the claiming — Rafael's answer, made in the most permanent language his world possessed, to every offer and threat and priced paper of the year: this is my son, his name is Luca Alessandro Castellano, and you may all take a photograph.

The photographers had been invited. It was Marco's favourite detail of the entire affair, and he told it to anyone who would stand still: the same press that had camped at the gates in the spring had been sent printed invitations, with a time, a place, and instructions about the flowers.

Tessa came up the aisle on no one's arm, in a dress the colour of deep water, with her son in her arms and her grandmother's — his grandmother's — ring on its chain at her throat, where it could be seen, which was also not an accident. Halfway down, at the font, she transferred the baby to Rafael, and Rafael held him for the whole service.

He did not pass him to the godmother for the anointing, or to the priest for the blessing, or to Nonna, who was enthroned in the front pew like a visiting sovereign and would not have taken him anyway, on principle — let them all look at who holds him, her posture said. He held him through the readings and the renouncements and the water, one hand spread across the small of his son's back, the other under him like a shelf, and when the water went over Luca's forehead the boy registered his objection at a volume that filled the cathedral to the roof beams, and Rafael laughed — startled, helpless, in front of both families and the cameras — and the laugh, everyone agreed afterward, was the photograph of the day. The Don of Providence, undone by twelve pounds of outrage in a christening gown, laughing over the font like any father who has ever lived.

Vittorio Marchetti sat in the fourth pew with his daughter beside him, correct as a treaty. Gianna, in grey silk, watched the service with the composed face of a woman attending the wedding she had not had, and when it was over she crossed the cathedral to Tessa — while the men were still arranging themselves around Rafael and the baby — and took both her hands, briefly, woman to woman, with no poison in it at all.

"Light," she said. "I heard what it means. You named him well." A pause, and the driest ghost of a smile. "We were both nearly clauses, you and I. I am glad one of us got a name into the document."

"You got your name into a different document," Tessa said. "I read about the shipping terms."

"Yes," said Gianna. "Mine pays better." And she was gone, into the crowd, before Tessa could decide whether she had been insulted or adopted.

Sofia discharged her duties as the family's senior child with a flower basket she had repurposed for the distribution of orders, informing the cathedral staff, the priest's assistant, and one bishop's driver of where they were to stand. Dr. Klein sat at the back in a hat. Aggie wept into a handkerchief the size of a flag at the words his name is Luca, and did not trouble to hide it.

It was Marco who saw the other thing.

He had taken his post, from long habit, at the back of the cathedral near the doors, where a man can watch a room whole. And in the last minutes of the service, during the final blessing, he saw the tall figure slip in through the side door and stand a moment in the shadow of the last pillar — an old man in a dark coat, hat in his hands, looking down the long aisle at the font, at his nephew laughing over his son, at the whole bright claimed future of the family he had been exiled from. He did not come forward. He did not stay for the photographs. He bent — stiffly, an old man's bend, a bad hip's negotiation — and set something down on the seat of the last pew, and then he was gone into the daylight before the organ had finished.

Marco waited until the crowd was moving before he went back for it.

It was a small box, worn at the corners, the leather gone soft as cloth. Inside, on a bed of yellowed cotton, lay a pair of cufflinks — gold, heavy, old-fashioned, each set with a dark red stone. Every Castellano over the age of twelve knew them on sight. They had belonged to Rafael's grandfather. They had been worn at every wedding, funeral, and declaration of two generations, and they had passed, by the family's iron custom, to the keeping of the eldest surviving son of that generation — to Vincenzo Castellano, who had carried them out of the house with him into exile, the one piece of family gold he took unsurrendered.

There was no card. There was no note, no name, no message of any kind. There was only the box, left in the last pew of a cathedral he had not been invited into, for a baby he had once tried to have priced and erased — his father's cufflinks, for the boy.

Marco carried them up the aisle in his palm, through the crowd, and put them into Rafael's free hand — the hand not holding his son — and said only, "Back pew. No card."

Rafael looked down at the gold in his hand for a long moment, while the cathedral emptied around him into sunlight and camera flashes and his daughter distributing orders on the steps. Tessa watched him. The whole story of the family was in that box: the sin and the price of it, the fifty years of dark, the old man standing in the shadow of a pillar unable to come forward and unable, in the end, to stay away.

"Keep them with his things," Rafael said at last, quietly, and closed his hand, and then — after a moment, with the air of a man amending a document he had thought finished — "Marco. When you write to him. The address. Tell him the boy wore his father's name well today."