The day my SAT scores arrived, I walked into the dining room carrying a metal box.
Inside were five hundred and seventy-six slips of paper, each stamped with a black seal.
My father called them permission slips. In Newark, a capo’s daughter couldn’t leave the territory or get extra cash without one. He’d turned his protection into a system of rewards and punishments that only applied to me. Finish my chores, get an A, keep my mouth shut about family business—each task earned me a single slip. Five hundred slips, and I could finally ask to take one trip outside our territory.
It had taken me three years to save them.
“I got a 1580 on the SATs,” I said, laying the score report on the table. “And I received a conditional offer from Westbridge Institute of Technology for their cybersecurity program. I’ve met all your conditions. I’ve earned my graduation trip.”
“So, when are we going to the Caribbean?”
The question landed like a stone. Marco stopped twirling his car keys.
Ava lowered her head.
After her parents died, the Ferraro Family had registered her as a protected orphan. Her travel, tuition, and security were all covered by the Family. She wasn’t subject to the permission slip system my father had designed for me.
My mother set down her coffee cup.
“Romy, you know Ava’s scores aren’t as good as yours. Why would you say that in front of her?”
“She’s already lost her parents. Do you have to remind her that in this house, everything she has depends on our charity?”
I froze.
To prove Ava wasn’t a charity case, my family gave her a credit card with no limit, a personal driver, and a full security detail.
Meanwhile, I—their actual daughter—had to hand over one of my father’s signed slips just to buy clothes, get new school supplies, or leave our guarded house on a weekend.
Their graduation gift to Ava was a full suite of the newest Apple devices, worth over ten thousand dollars.
They also bought her every birthday gift she had missed, from birth to age eighteen.
The next day, a new itinerary appeared in our family group chat.
The Caribbean cruise was off.
They were taking Ava to Orlando instead. My father assigned two cars and four guards, a full detail to ensure nothing happened to the girl the Family had publicly sworn to protect on her first trip out of New Jersey.
No one asked if I wanted to go.
I threw the metal box in the trash.
My parents always said Ava was a responsibility the Family owed the dead, so she deserved the best of everything.
But I had parents. A brother. I was a Vitale, same as them. And somehow, I was always the one left to fend for myself.
If that was the way it was going to be, then there was no reason to go back to a home that only recognized my obligations, but never me.
The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 33 After the cruise, I went back to California and started my new job. On my first day, my supervisor sent over the project requirements for the education sector client. The current system allowed parents, guardians, and internal administrators to claim financial aid on a student’s behalf. If
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 32 A month later, I used the signing bonus from my first full-time job to buy a ticket for a Caribbean cruise. As the booking page loaded, I thought back to when I was eighteen. I had stood in front of my family with that metal box in
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 31 Ava walked over, her gaze fixed on the ground. “I always thought you had too much.” “You had parents, a brother, the Vitale name. So if the Ferraro Family gave me a little more, I thought that was only fair.” “Later, when they stopped paying for everything,
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 30 After the ceremony, my mother was waiting for me at the exit. Four years had passed, and there was much more white in her hair. My father stood beside her, his hands empty. Marco gave me a quiet nod from a few feet back. At last, they
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 29 Four years passed faster than I expected. I was accepted into a graduate program and also received a full-time offer from a security technology company. My job would be designing data protection systems for medical and educational institutions. It was a career that had nothing to do
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 28 Later, things in Newark quieted down. My mother stopped trying new numbers to contact me. My father sent me one email a month, usually just about the weather or his health. After losing his seat on the internal council, he didn’t pressure the advisors to reverse their
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 27 That night, my father emailed me, too. He brought up the math test. *You asked me why, when you got a 780, I was still dissatisfied.* *That day, when I got back to the office, I told everyone my daughter was only twenty points away from a
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 26 My nineteenth birthday arrived soon after. That morning, the dorm’s front desk called to tell me there were eighteen packages waiting for me. They were all from my mother. Each package was labeled with an age. One through eighteen. Standing at the desk, I thought about how
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 25 The group chat went silent for a long time. No one could refute her. Ava had taken advantage of their guilt over the dead, and she had grown accustomed to the priority that came with being a protected orphan. But the people who had pushed me aside,
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The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 24 The education fund’s internal investigation lasted more than a month. Three managing advisors verified the claim records and my signature, then sent their conclusions to the Ferraro Family boss’s council. In the end, my mother admitted she had signed my name. The five thousand dollars she had
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