Chapter 4: What Gianna Claimed to Know
I read the message twice.
*You have no idea what I know about her.*
"What does that mean?" I asked.
Bryson set the phone face-down.
"I don't know."
"Bryson."
He looked up.
"I genuinely don't know.
She sends messages like that when she's cornered.
It might be nothing."
"And if it's not nothing?"
He didn't answer immediately.
That pause — small as it was — landed in my chest like a stone.
"It's nothing," he said.
"She's angry and she's trying to scare you."
I nodded.
I went to bed.
I lay there in the dark listening to Stella breathe through the monitor, and I told myself he was right.
Three days passed.
On the fourth day, Gianna called Bryson's sister.
Her name was Renata — two years younger than Bryson, closer to their mother than he had ever been.
She called Bryson that evening while I was giving Stella a bath.
I heard his voice from the hallway, low and careful, the way he spoke when he was trying not to let me hear something.
When he came into the bathroom doorway, his expression told me before his words did.
"Renata wants to meet with us," he said.
"Both of us.
She says Mom told her something and she wants us to hear it directly."
I lifted Stella out of the tub and wrapped her in a towel.
"What did she tell her?"
"She wouldn't say over the phone."
I looked at him.
"And you want to go."
"I think we need to."
We met Renata at a coffee shop two days later.
She was already there when we arrived, sitting with both hands around her mug, not drinking it.
She looked uncomfortable in the way people do when they've been given information they didn't ask for and don't know what to do with.
She waited until we sat down.
"Mom told me she has proof," Renata said.
"That's the word she used.
Proof."
"Proof of what?" Bryson asked.
Renata glanced at me, then back at her brother.
"She says she hired someone.
Before the DNA test.
She says she has photographs."
The coffee shop noise continued around us.
Someone laughed at the next table.
"Photographs of what?" I said.
"Of you." Renata's voice was careful, not cruel.
"With another man.
At a hotel.
She says they were taken about ten months ago."
I stared at her.
Ten months ago I had been seven months pregnant.
"That's not possible," I said.
"I know," Renata said quickly.
"I told her that.
I told her you were pregnant.
She said the man in the photographs was someone you worked with.
She said—" Renata stopped.
She set her mug down.
"She said she was going to show Bryson if he didn't come back to her side."
Bryson went very still beside me.
"She threatened that?" he said.
"She said it like it was just information she was sharing." Renata shook her head.
"But yes.
That's what it was."
I thought about the hotel she meant.
Ten months ago.
I had attended a work conference.
Two days, one night, a group of twelve colleagues.
I had called Bryson both evenings.
I had sent him a photograph of the terrible conference dinner because we had a joke about bad hotel food.
"I have every text from that trip," I said.
"I have the conference itinerary.
I have the hotel receipt in my name with check-in and check-out times.
I was there for work.
With eleven other people."
Renata nodded slowly.
"I believe you."
"Does your mother?" Bryson asked.
Renata was quiet for a moment.
"I think she found what she was looking for," she said.
"Or she paid someone to find it."
Bryson leaned back in his chair.
He looked at the ceiling for a second, then back at his sister.
"I need to see these photographs," he said.
"Bryson—" I started.
"Not because I doubt you," he said, and his voice was firm.
"Because I want to know exactly what she's built.
And then I want to take it apart."
Renata pulled out her phone.
"She sent me one," she said.
"To show me she was serious."
She turned the screen toward us.
The photograph showed a woman with dark hair walking through a hotel lobby beside a man in a gray jacket.
The woman's face was turned slightly away from the camera.
The angle was deliberate.
It could have been anyone.
It could have been me.
"That's not enough to prove anything," Bryson said.
"No," Renata agreed.
"But Mom isn't trying to prove something in court." She looked at me.
"She's trying to make Bryson doubt you again.
And she's going to show him more unless he does what she wants."
I looked at that photograph on the small screen.
The woman's posture.
The way she held her bag.
The gray jacket on the man beside her.
Something about it felt wrong in a way I couldn't name yet.
Then Renata said, "There's one more thing Mom told me."
She set the phone down.
"She said the man in the photographs isn't just a colleague."
She paused.
May you like
"She said his name is Daniel.
And she said you'd know exactly who that is."
