Chapter 8: The Other Woman
Emma refused to let go of me.
Even after we returned to the mansion, she remained wrapped around my waist as though someone might pull her away again.
Alessandro moved us into the secure family wing.
Vanessa had disappeared during the blackout.
Vittorio claimed he did not know where she was.
No one believed him.
Marco traced Dr. Hargrove’s financial records to a private fertility clinic in Connecticut.
A nurse named Lila Grant agreed to meet us.
She was already packing when we arrived.
“You should leave,” she whispered. “They watch everyone.”
“Who is they?” Alessandro asked.
“The Cole Foundation. Vittorio Moretti. People whose names never appear on clinic records.”
Lila opened a locked cabinet.
Inside were files showing that Vanessa had never received Alessandro’s embryo.
The stored genetic material had been destroyed legally three years earlier.
“So she conceived naturally,” I said.
Lila nodded.
“With Matteo Moretti.”
Alessandro looked away, but his face revealed nothing.
Vanessa had not only lied about the pregnancy.
She had betrayed him with his cousin.
“Why use the maternity belly?” I asked.
“Vanessa originally planned to announce the pregnancy two months earlier. She needed to appear farther along so the dates would match the last time she and Alessandro were together.”
The real pregnancy had come later than planned.
The pillow allowed her to create a false timeline.
Lila handed us another folder.
It contained records for a woman named Evelyn Bennett.
My mother.
I had not seen that name since I was a child.
“She was treated here?” I asked.
“Not here. These records were transferred from another facility.”
I read the faded pages.
My mother had worked as a nurse for Antonio Moretti nearly thirty years ago.
After he was shot behind St. Michael’s Church, she helped keep him alive for three days.
She had also given birth to a daughter six months earlier.
Me.
Alessandro studied the documents.
“Was Antonio my father?”
The question made my stomach turn.
Lila shook her head.
“No. But Evelyn witnessed the man who ordered his murder.”
My mother had died in what police called a robbery when I was seven.
She had not been killed for money.
She had been silenced.
“Daniel learned about your mother,” Lila said. “That was why he accepted the Harbor Tower job. He believed evidence had been buried beneath the construction site.”
“Who hired him?”
“Antonio Moretti.”
“That is impossible,” Alessandro said.
Lila opened one final file.
Antonio had survived far longer than anyone knew.
For almost twenty years, he had lived under another identity.
He had hired Daniel to expose Vittorio.
Then the clinic windows shattered.
A bullet struck Lila in the chest.
Alessandro pulled me to the floor as more shots tore through the room.
Before losing consciousness, Lila pushed a photograph into my hand.
It showed Antonio Moretti alive only six months earlier.
May you like
Standing beside him was Daniel.
My husband had supposedly been dead for three years.
