Don Bowed To Me Chapter 02
I remembered senior year of high school.
I was eighteen. Isabella had transferred back from her Catholic prep school in Los Angeles.
My mother had sent her there for etiquette lessons, French, everything she’d need to one day carry the Vitale name into a Five Families ballroom.
She effortlessly became part of the little trio Ethan, Melanie, and I had grown up together in.
And just like at home, I became the invisible one all over again.
Isabella’s voice message snapped me out of my thoughts.
【Hazel, don’t take the Venmo thing personally.】
Her tone was all soft edges.
【I know rent in New York is brutal and things are tight for you. I just wanted to help cover your flight. That’s all I meant by it.】
A teary-eyed emoji followed.
Right on cue, the group chat filled up with people praising how thoughtful she was.
I screenshotted the one-cent Venmo payment and sent it back.
The chat went quiet for a few seconds.
Elliot was the first to snap.
【Hazel, what the hell? Not enough for you?】
【You didn’t even finish college. Isabella’s still willing to seat you in the main ballroom instead of at the overflow tables.She was nice enough to send you money, and you still had the audacity to complain it wasn’t enough?】
Ethan: 【A penny’s still a gesture.】
Melanie: 【Do you have any idea what a position you’re putting Isabella in?】
I leaned back in my chair and took a sip of coffee.
At eighteen, that kind of pile-on would’ve kept me up all night.
At twenty-eight, I didn’t feel a thing.
Isabella sent a voice memo.
Careful, apologetic.
【Hazel, I got so excited when I heard you were coming home, my hand slipped. Please don’t be upset, okay?】
【I already talked to Matteo about finding you a place with the Family. Maybe hostess at the Newport club. Front desk at the restaurant on Bellevue. Given that you never finished college, we can’t exactly put you in a high-profile position. Don’t take it the wrong way.】
Elliot scoffed.
【What right does she have to take it the wrong way? Every time someone in the Family asks about her, I’m too embarrassed to answer.】
Ten years ago, when college decisions came in the mail.
Isabella got into Yale.
I got one rejection letter and a waitlist notice from community college.
My parents booked a two-week trip through the Amalfi Coast for Isabella and Elliot.
They handed me fifty dollars.
“You couldn’t even get into a community college. You embarrassed the Vitale name. You don’t deserve to come with us.”
I tried to tell them I’d been accepted early.
My mother threw a coffee mug at my forehead.
I still had the small scar above my eyebrow.
I never finished the sentence.
I never told them about the USAMO gold medal.
Or that MIT had offered me a full Presidential Scholarship.
Let Isabella be the one they married into the Five Families to serve as the Vitale name’s public face.
A knock at the door.
Emma, my assistant, stood in the doorway, her voice careful and respectful.
“Dr. Vitale. Dr. Langley called personally this time. Don Salvatore is asking for thirty minutes. Any location. Any time this month.”
The clean side of the Marchetti operation had already sunk half a billion dollars into a defense subcontracting venture.
The Pentagon contract they were desperate to win required a neural signal decoding architecture capable of defeating the FBI’s voice-recognition stack.
They had been stalled on the algorithm for two years.
I happened to hold the patent.
Emma hesitated. “Should I decline again?”
I gave a soft laugh.
“No. Tell Don Salvatore I’ll be in Newport this weekend.”