“I don’t want your sister to feel embarrassed.”

He grins. “She should feel stupid. It’s about damn time.”

“Come on!” I say, pulling him away. I make him walk all the way back to the crepe shop with me.

“Those silly kids,” he says, shaking his head. “Why don’t they know they should fall in love, when it’s so damn obvious?”

I look up at him, at his wolfish smile and his bright blue eyes.

“It’s just obvious, huh?” I say.

“Yup,” he says. “Sometimes it’s clearly meant to be. I knew it from the moment I saw you.”

“All you knew was that you were driving me crazy.”

“Yup,” he grins. “And I wanted to do it a whole lot more.”

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Sebastian

I’m sitting in the corner booth of La Mer with my two brothers and my little sister Aida. It’s an hour past closing time, so the servers have already taken the linen and glassware off the tables, and the cooks are just finishing their deep-clean of the stove tops and fridges.

The bartender is still doing his nightly inventory check, probably lingering longer than usual in case any of us want one last drink. That’s the perks of owning the restaurant — nobody can kick you out.

La Mer is known for its high-end seafood. Halibut and salmon flown in from the east coast every morning, and king crab legs longer than your arm. We all feasted on butter-drenched lobster earlier in the evening. For the last several hours we’ve simply been sipping our drinks and talking. This might be our last night all together for a while.

Dante leaves for Paris tomorrow morning. He’s taking his wife, his son, and his brand-new baby girl across the Atlantic for what he’s calling an extended honeymoon. But I’ve got a feeling that he’s not coming back.

Dante never wanted to become the capocrimine. He’s been the de facto leader of our family for years only because he’s the eldest — not because it was his ambition.

Of course my father is still the real Don, but his health is getting worse every year. He’s been delegating more and more of the running of our family business. It used to be that he personally handled every meeting with the other mafia families — no matter how small the issue. Now he only puts on his suit and goes out for the most dire of situations.

He’s become a hermit in our old house on Meyer Ave. If our housekeeper Greta didn’t also live there full-time, eating lunch with him, and listening to him complain about how Steinbeck should be ranked higher than Hemingway in the pantheon of authors, then I might be seriously worried about him.

I guess I feel guilty because I could be living there with him, too. All the rest of my siblings have moved out — Dante and Aida to get married, Nero to live with his girlfriend Camille in the apartment over her brand new custom car mod shop.