Chapter 4 - The Father of Her Child
Nora pulled the blanket to her chin when Brody appeared behind a hospital security officer.
He looked older than she remembered, with a healing cut over one eyebrow and a designer jacket she knew he couldn't afford. The smile he gave her was the same one that had once made her believe promises were worth something.
“Baby,” he said. “I've been looking everywhere.”
“Leave.”
“Don't be like that. I heard you were sick.”
“You heard I was working for the Morettis.”
His smile faded.
Lorenzo stepped between them. “She asked you to leave.”
Brody looked him over. “This is between me and my fiancée.”
“Former fiancée,” Nora said.
Brody leaned sideways to see her. “We need to talk about Lily.”
Nora froze. She had never told him the baby's name.
Lorenzo noticed. “How do you know that?”
Brody's eyes flickered. “She told me.”
“No,” Nora said.
Security escorted him away, but not before he whispered, “Ask your boss what happened to your mother.”
Nora had been told her mother died when she was eight, after a late-night highway collision. Her father had died years earlier. An aunt had raised her until Nora turned eighteen. There was nothing for Brody to know.
Yet when Lorenzo asked her mother's name, something tightened in his face.
“Evelyn Carter,” she answered. “Why?”
Lorenzo said he needed to check something. He left before she could ask again.
At the estate, Marco recovered the security archive from an off-site backup. The footage showed Mrs. Gable entering Giovanni's room at night, administering injections, and once holding a telephone beside his ear while a man's voice demanded that he agree to a transaction. Giovanni's eyes had moved furiously. The woman on the recording laughed.
“You can refuse all you want,” she told him. “Your son thinks you're gone.”
Lorenzo watched the footage twice. Then he smashed the monitor with his fist.
Marco waited for the rage to pass. “There's something else. The medical invoices were paid through a foundation your father established before the stroke.”
“The Moretti Family Trust?”
“No. A separate one. The Evelyn Carter Memorial Foundation.”
Lorenzo went still.
Evelyn Carter had once been the accountant who uncovered missing money in his father's organization. Lorenzo remembered an argument when he was seventeen, the night Evelyn disappeared from their lives. His father had refused to explain it.
“Evelyn died in a car accident,” Lorenzo said.
“According to the official report. But her accident file was sealed after a private settlement.”
Lorenzo drove back to the hospital. Nora was asleep. He stood outside her room, looking at the ultrasound image pinned beside her bed, and wondered how much his family had taken from hers.
His phone rang.
It was an unknown number.
A woman's voice said, “You have the wrong traitor, Lorenzo.”
“Who is this?”
May you like
“Ask your father why Evelyn Carter was buried under another woman's name.”
The line went dead.
