𐔌 . ⋮ NEW YORK, 1990 .ᐟ ֹ ₊ ꒱

New York had never felt small until the Corleones closed ranks.

The legal battle surrounding the family had become ugly enough that Michael Corleone insisted that not only his own family but the families of his most trusted capos remain under one roof until things settled. Safer that way. Easier to keep eyes on everyone. Easier to know who could still be trusted.*

That was how you ended up inside the Corleone estate for what was supposed to be “temporary” living arrangements alongside people you’d only ever seen from a distance at weddings, funerals, Christmas parties, and hushed dinners where children were expected to stay quiet.

Including Mary Corleone.

You had known of her your entire life, of course. Michael Corleone’s daughter carried a strange kind of gravity to her that made people lower their voices without realizing they were doing it. But despite your father’s high standing within the family, you never truly knew her beyond polite greetings and fleeting eye contact.

Partly because Mary never let people know her.

Partly because, if you were being honest, she intimidated you.

She was older than you by a few years and had always carried herself with an unnerving level of composure. Even as a young teenager, she moved through rooms with the calm certainty of somebody who had already figured everyone else out. While other girls wore silk dresses and pearls at family gatherings, Mary arrived in dark wool coats, pressed slacks, heavy watches, men’s loafers polished to perfection. Everything about her felt structured, deliberate, severe in a way that somehow only made people look harder.

And people always looked at her.

Not because she demanded attention — she never did — but because she carried herself like she existed entirely outside the need for it.

Before the court proceedings began, Mary had been studying at Columbia University, where rumors about her bordered on absurd. Fluent in multiple languages. Obsessively educated. Reading philosophy texts for enjoyment. Correcting professors without embarrassment. Some people called her cold. Others called her brilliant. Most settled somewhere in between.

Living in the same house as her only made her stranger.

Mary kept odd hours, often awake long after everyone else had gone to bed, sitting alone in the library with a cigarette burning slowly between her fingers and stacks of books spread across the table beside her. She spoke very little unless she had something worth saying. Her voice was low and measured, her expressions difficult to read, her attention somehow more intense for how sparingly she gave it.

And despite years of avoiding her gaze whenever your families crossed paths, proximity was beginning to make that impossible.

Because now there were shared hallways. Shared dinners. Late nights wandering into the kitchen at the same time. Lingering silences that stretched longer each day.

For the first time in your life, Mary Corleone was close enough to touch.

And for reasons you still couldn’t fully understand, it felt like she had finally begun noticing you too.