Chapter 7: What Brody Did Next
He drove back to the city and spent three days thinking.
Nora learned this later, in pieces, from Marco's security reports.
She did not ask for them — Lorenzo left them on the kitchen table one morning without comment, the way he had begun doing with small things he thought she should know.
Brody had gone back to the apartment he was sharing with two other men in Queens.
He had made calls.
He had looked up the Moretti name — and then, according to the phone records Marco's team had obtained, he had stopped making calls for almost twenty-four hours.
Then he had called a lawyer.
Not a good one.
A man named Stills who operated out of a shared office in Midtown and specialized in what he called family advocacy — which meant, in practice, that he sent threatening letters on official letterhead to people who didn't know enough to ignore them.
The letter arrived at the estate four days after Brody had stood at the gate in the snow.
Lorenzo brought it to Nora at breakfast.
He set it on the table beside her tea without opening it.
"It's addressed to you," he said.
She read it.
Then she read it again.
Brody, through Stills, was asserting parental rights.
He was claiming that Nora had removed herself and the unborn child from their shared residence — the apartment he had abandoned, she noted, six weeks before she had left it — and that he had been denied access.
He was requesting, formally, that she present herself for mediation.
He was also, in a paragraph near the bottom that tried to sound casual, noting that he was aware she was residing at a private estate and that he had concerns about the environment in which his child would be raised.
Nora set the letter down.
"He's trying to frighten me," she said.
"Yes," Lorenzo said.
"He thinks if I'm scared enough I'll leave here.
Go somewhere he can reach me."
"Yes."
She looked at him.
"What do I do?"
Lorenzo sat down across from her.
This was new — in the days since the blizzard, he had begun doing this, sitting at the same table, having coffee in the same room.
It had happened gradually enough that she hadn't noticed until it was already a pattern.
"You have two options," he said.
"You can respond through your own legal representation, which I will arrange and cover.
Or you can do nothing, because the letter has no legal force and Stills knows it." He paused.
"But there is a third option."
"What's that?"
"We find out what Brody actually wants." Lorenzo turned his coffee cup in his hands.
"Men like him don't want children.
They don't want responsibility.
They want leverage.
Something they can use." He looked at her.
"He came here because he found out where you were.
Someone told him the name Moretti.
And now he's pushing — not because he wants your daughter, but because he thinks you're valuable to someone here and he wants to know how valuable."
Nora was quiet.
"He wants money," she said.
"Almost certainly."
She thought about Brody at the gate.
The way his eyes had moved past the camera toward the house.
Calculating.
"Then give him nothing," she said.
"Not a response, not a meeting, not a single word.
If he has no leverage, he has nothing."
Lorenzo looked at her for a moment.
Something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one.
"That's exactly right," he said.
He picked up the letter and set it aside.
"There's something else," he said.
"My father's physician is coming tomorrow for his quarterly visit.
I've asked him to do a full assessment — not the standard one.
A proper evaluation." He paused.
"I want to know what my father is actually capable of.
What he might be able to recover."
Nora looked up.
"You think he's been undertreated."
"I think he's been deliberately undertreated," Lorenzo said.
"I think someone decided it was more convenient for my father to appear more incapacitated than he is." He held her gaze.
"I think you may have been the only person in this house who treated him like a man who was still present."
The words landed quietly.
Nora thought of all the evenings in room 4B — the way Giovanni's eyes had tracked her movements, the way his grip had tightened at exactly the right moments, the tear she had wiped from his cheek.
"He understands everything," she said.
"He always has."
"I know," Lorenzo said.
He stood, and for a moment he just looked at her — the way his father looked at her, with that quality of attention that didn't flinch.
"Stills sent a copy of that letter to a journalist," he said.
"A gossip column.
The kind that runs stories about wealthy families and scandal." He said it without inflection.
"It will probably run tomorrow."
Nora's stomach dropped.
"What will it say?"
"That a pregnant maid is living at the Moretti estate.
That there are questions about the nature of the arrangement." He paused.
"It will imply things that are not true."
She stared at him.
"Brody did this," she said.
"Stills did it.
On Brody's instruction." Lorenzo picked up his coffee.
"He's escalating because silence felt like strength to him.
He wants you frightened enough to reach out."
"What do we do?"
Lorenzo looked at her steadily.
May you like
"We let it run," he said.
"And then we show them exactly who you are."
