Chapter 16 - THE BROTHER THEY ERASEDI had spent my entire life believing Adrian was my only brother.
My father had told us that our family was small because loyalty was rare. My mother had said we were blessed to have one another. At every holiday, there had been three places at the head of the table: my father, my mother, and me, with Adrian beside me.
No one had ever mentioned another son.
Now an old birth certificate suggested that Isabella and Gabriel Moretti had a child before either Adrian or I was born.
A child they had erased.
“What's his name?” I asked Helen Price.
She shook her head.
“I never saw the complete certificate. The original was removed from the hospital archive.”
“Who removed it?”
“Gabriel.”
I leaned back.
“Why did he hide his own son?”
Helen looked at Claire.
“Because the child wasn't born into the circumstances your father wanted.”
“What circumstances?”
“I don't know. I was a hospital administrator, Mr. Moretti. I signed documents I was told had been approved by attorneys. I didn't understand what your family was doing.”
“You signed a document that changed a child's identity.”
“Yes.”
Her voice cracked.
“And I have regretted it every day since.”
Rachel intervened before I could ask another question.
“Helen, we need you to provide a formal statement to the investigators. They will determine which documents were altered and who was responsible. You should speak with your attorney before making any additional statements.”
Helen nodded.
As we left the office, Claire took my arm.
“Vincent, what if this is another trick?”
I looked at her.
“Then we'll find the evidence.”
“What if the child in the photograph isn't related to us?”
“Then we'll find out who he is.”
She searched my face.
“And if he is your brother?”
I thought of Adrian.
Of all the things he had concealed.
Of the way he had cried in his office when I discovered he knew about Claire's pregnancy.
“I don't know what that would mean,” I admitted. “But it wouldn't make him responsible for what our parents did.”
Claire nodded slowly.
“That matters.”
I looked at her.
“What?”
“You said it wouldn't make him responsible. You didn't say you'd decide what happens to him.”
I understood.
For most of my life, I had treated information as a weapon and decisions as my personal property.
I was trying to learn that truth did not grant me the right to control everyone around me.
That evening, Adrian came to the townhouse at Rachel's request.
Claire agreed to speak with him, but she insisted that I remain present.
Adrian sat at the kitchen table, staring at the photocopy of the birth certificate.
“Another brother,” he whispered.
“Possibly,” Rachel corrected. “We have evidence of an additional birth record, but we don't yet know the child's identity or whether it connects to the missing infant.”
Adrian rubbed his face.
“Dad never mentioned another child.”
“Neither did Mom,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Do you remember the old photographs in the lake house?”
I frowned.
“What photographs?”
“The ones in the locked study. When we were kids, Dad kept a box of photographs there. I remember seeing a baby in one of them.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because I thought it was you.”
“What?”
Adrian looked embarrassed.
“We were only four and eight. I saw a picture of a baby in Mom's arms. Dad said it was you when you were born. But the date on the back was wrong.”
I stared at him.
“What date?”
“Before you were born.”
The kitchen became silent.
Adrian continued.
“I asked Dad about it once. He took the photograph away and told me never to mention it again.”
“Did you ever see it after that?”
“No.”
I looked toward Claire.
She was watching us carefully.
“Where is the box now?” I asked.
Adrian shook his head.
“The lake house was sold years ago.”
“Sold to whom?”
He hesitated.
“Thomas Vale.”
The name again.
I rose from the table and walked to the window.
For fifteen years, the name Gabriel Moretti had represented a grave, a funeral, and a past I believed I understood.
Now every road seemed to lead back to the same man.
“Find the sale records,” I told Ethan.
Rachel corrected me.
“Request them through the investigators.”
I looked at her.
Then nodded.
“Request them through the investigators.”
For once, no one had to remind me twice.
Two days later, the records arrived.
The lake house had not been sold in the ordinary sense. Ownership had transferred to a trust, which had later transferred it to a company registered under Thomas Vale.
The property was still standing.
And someone had paid the taxes on it every year.
Ethan showed us the latest security photograph.
A black sedan sat in the driveway.
The same sedan that had appeared outside Lydia Cross's house.
Claire stared at the image.
“That's where the baby is.”
“Possibly,” Rachel said. “We cannot establish that from the vehicle alone.”
I looked at the photograph.
“Then let's establish it.”
The investigators obtained the necessary authorization to search the property.
They found an empty nursery.
A small bed.
A locked filing cabinet.
And a framed photograph resting on the mantel.
My father stood beside a woman I had never seen.
Between them was a boy of perhaps six years old.
The child had dark hair and a serious expression.
He wore a small silver pendant shaped like a crescent.
On the back of the photograph, someone had written:
Thomas and Gabriel, 1998.
I stared at the image.
“Thomas,” I whispered.
The boy in the photograph was standing beside my father.
But the name Thomas was not the name of a child.
It was the name of the man who had helped my father disappear.
Rachel examined the photograph.
“Do you recognize the woman?”
“No.”
Adrian stepped closer.
“I do.”
We all turned.
He swallowed.
“She was at Dad's funeral.”
I stared at him.
“Who was she?”
“His sister.”
I frowned.
“My father didn't have a sister.”
Adrian looked toward the empty nursery.
“He told us he didn't.”
Then he pointed to the child.
“Vincent, look at his eyes.”
I examined the photograph.
The boy had dark eyes, a narrow face, and a slight crease between his eyebrows.
A crease I had seen in my own childhood photographs.
A crease I had seen in Adrian's face when he was angry.
Then I noticed the child's left hand.
Two fingers were slightly bent.
The same old injury that had appeared in the photograph of the man standing beside my mother eleven years earlier.
My father had been standing beside himself.
Or someone who looked enough like him to deceive us.
I turned to Rachel.
“Who is Thomas Vale?”
She looked at the records again.
“We're still investigating.”
“No,” I said quietly. “We're looking at the wrong question.”
I pointed to the photograph.
“Thomas Vale isn't the person who helped my father disappear.”
I looked at Adrian.
“He's the person my father wanted everyone to believe he was.”
And if that was true, then someone had spent fifteen years impersonating a dead man while using a dead man's identity to hide children.
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The question was no longer whether Gabriel Moretti had survived.
It was whether the man who had raised us had ever been Gabriel Moretti at all.
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