Chapter 7 - Derek’s Price
Derek called me that evening.
Luca wanted me to ignore it.
I answered anyway.
“Emma.”
Derek sounded exhausted.
“Where are you?”
“You lost the right to ask.”
“Listen to me.”
“No.”
“I made a mistake at the hospital.”
I almost laughed.
“You humiliated me fifteen minutes after I gave birth.”
“I panicked.”
“You called our daughter a question mark.”
Silence.
Then Derek changed tactics.
“Moretti is manipulating you.”
My grip tightened around the phone.
“How do you know anything about Luca?”
Another silence.
Too long.
“You do know him.”
“Everybody knows him.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Derek exhaled.
“Come home.”
“No.”
“Emma.”
“No.”
“I can explain everything.”
“Then explain Brittany.”
He stopped breathing.
I knew it.
“You were with her before I got pregnant.”
“Who showed you that?”
“So it’s true.”
“It isn’t what you think.”
“Nothing ever is.”
I ended the call.
Ten seconds later a text arrived.
DEREK: Ask Moretti why he really signed that form.
I showed Luca.
His jaw tightened.
“What does he mean?”
“Derek is trying to destabilize you.”
“Then stabilize me.”
Luca remained silent.
I stood.
“Why did you sign?”
His expression softened.
“Because he wouldn’t.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It was in that moment.”
“You knew my mother’s name.”
“Yes.”
“You knew somebody was searching my records.”
“Yes.”
“You knew there might be a Moretti connection.”
“I suspected a connection to Eleanor.”
“So you put your name beside my daughter’s because you thought she might belong to your family.”
“No.”
His answer was immediate.
“I put my name there because a newborn child was listening to a man reject her before she had been alive an hour.”
I stared at him.
“She couldn’t understand him.”
“That doesn’t make it less ugly.”
For some reason, that hurt.
Because Derek had spent years making cruelty sound reasonable.
Luca made kindness sound obvious.
My phone buzzed again.
This time the message included a photograph.
Derek stood beside my apartment building.
Brittany was with him.
The caption read:
COME HOME OR THEY TAKE EVERYTHING.
Then another message arrived from an unknown number.
A video.
I pressed play.
Derek appeared inside my apartment.
He opened the floorboard beneath my mother’s old desk.
He removed a yellow envelope.
I had never known the compartment existed.
Brittany asked, “Is that it?”
Derek nodded.
Then a third voice spoke from off camera.
Old.
Male.
Italian.
“Open it.”
Luca heard the voice.
Every muscle in his body went rigid.
“Carlo.”
On the video, Derek opened my mother’s envelope.
Inside was another photograph.
The camera moved closer.
It showed my mother holding me as a baby.
Beside us stood Alessandra Moretti.
May you like
Alive.
Years after the family claimed she had disappeared.
