Chapter 4: The Person Who Planted the Idea
I didn't sleep that night.
I lay in the dark and listened to Marcus and Lily breathing through the baby monitor I still kept out of habit, even though they were seven and would be furious if they knew.
And I thought about the one question I had never fully answered, even for myself.
Why hadn't I told him?
The honest answer was not simple.
It was layered the way old grief always is — one thing underneath another, and another beneath that.
When I discovered I was pregnant, Luca and I had been separated for eleven weeks.
The divorce papers were already drafted.
He had not called once.
And I had spent those eleven weeks slowly, painfully dismantling the belief that I had failed him — replacing it with something harder and cleaner: that he had failed me.
So I made a choice.
I called my sister Dara instead.
That was the morning I started building a different life.
What I had never told anyone — not Dara, not my attorney, not the therapist I saw for two years after the divorce — was that I knew who had planted the idea in Luca's mind.
The poisonous suggestion that the fertility problem was mine.
That I was hiding something.
His name was Richard Holt.
Richard had been Luca's CFO for nine years.
He was the kind of man who wore his ambition like a second suit — always present, always immaculate, always slightly too comfortable in rooms where he should have been deferential.
He had never liked me.
I had understood that from the first dinner where I watched him redirect every conversation away from me with the smooth efficiency of someone who had practiced it.
What I hadn't understood, until much later, was why.
I found out six months after the divorce, through a woman named Priya who had worked in Moretti Global's legal department.
We had stayed loosely in touch.
She called me one afternoon, hesitant, saying she wasn't sure she should be telling me this.
"Richard Holt has been positioning himself as Luca's successor for three years," she said.
"He was terrified of you.
He thought you had too much influence.
That you were the one person Luca actually listened to."
I had sat very still on the other end of the phone.
"He told Luca the fertility specialist's assistant had spoken to him privately," Priya continued.
"That there were concerns about your test results that you hadn't disclosed.
He made it sound like he was protecting Luca."
"There were no undisclosed concerns," I said.
"I know," Priya said.
"I know that now.
I'm sorry it took me this long."
I had never told Luca.
I had been too angry, and then too far away, and then the twins arrived and the anger became something else — something quieter and more permanent that I simply learned to carry.
But now Luca had my number on a paper napkin.
And at seven-fifteen the following morning, while Marcus and Lily were eating breakfast and arguing about whose turn it was to choose the cartoon, my phone rang again.
This time I answered.
"Nia." His voice was rough.
He hadn't slept either.
"Thank you for picking up."
"Say what you need to say, Luca."
A pause.
Long enough that I could hear him decide something.
"I need to know everything," he said.
"Not just about the children.
About why.
About what happened.
All of it."
I watched Marcus pour too much syrup on his waffle.
"There's more to it than you think," I said.
"I know."
"You might not like what you hear."
"I know that too."
I set my coffee down.
"There's a café on Meridian.
Halsted and Meridian.
I'll be there Thursday at ten.
Come alone."
Another pause.
"I'll be there," he said.
I hung up.
Lily looked up from her toast.
"Who was that, Mom?"
"Someone I used to know," I said.
She studied me for a moment with those dark eyes that were not entirely mine.
"Is he coming back?" she asked.
May you like
I didn't answer right away.
And she, being Lily, understood that the silence was its own kind of answer.
