Chapter 12 - THE WEDDING THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN
Canceled weddings leave debris.
Flowers.
Deposits.
Hotel rooms.
Guests with plane tickets.
Food enough for three hundred people.
We donated what could be donated.
Paid what contracts required.
No threatening vendors because the bride behaved badly.
The cathedral kept part of the fee.
The band charged cancellation.
Fair.
Then the Moretti relatives.
Half left town quietly.
Half stayed because their hotel rooms were already paid.
One group went sightseeing.
Human beings survive social catastrophe faster than pride predicts.
The Moretti-Rizzano business review continued separately.
That became the strongest message I could send.
Bianca’s conduct would not make her father’s properties automatically uninvestable.
Her father’s properties would not make Bianca automatically forgivable.
Separate lanes.
The revised commercial transaction eventually closed at ten and a half million dollars, not eighteen.
Independent terms.
No marriage.
Salvatore contributed fresh capital.
One weak property sold.
The Morettis survived.
Bianca’s belief that she had to deliver Alessandro Rizzano to save them had been false.
Then Salvatore sent me a handwritten note:
May you like
I should have taught my daughter she could belong to this family without bringing us anything.
I kept that one.
