Chapter 6: The Father's Move
Marco Reyes opened the door of his West Village apartment in a grey sweatshirt with flour on the sleeve and asked no questions at all.
He looked at me once — at my stomach, at my face, at the bag Luca was carrying — and then he stepped back and said, "Kitchen's warm.
There's food."
That was it.
I sat at his kitchen table while Luca stood near the window with his phone and Marco made tea without being asked.
The apartment smelled like bread and old books.
A tabby cat appeared from somewhere and sat beside my chair and did not move.
"You don't have to stay up," I told Marco.
"I know," he said, and put a mug in front of me.
Luca was still on the phone.
I could hear fragments — *financial records*, *notary verification*, *chain of custody*.
His voice was low and very focused, the way it got when he was working, and I had forgotten that I knew the sound of it.
Marco sat down across from me.
"You doing all right?" he said.
"I don't know yet."
He nodded like that was a reasonable answer.
"He called me once," Marco said.
"About four months after you left.
Didn't say much.
Asked if I'd heard from you." He wrapped his hands around his own mug.
"I hadn't.
But I could tell from the way he asked that something was wrong with the story he'd been told."
I looked up.
"He never said you'd done anything," Marco said quickly.
"He just — he asked like a man who was trying to make a fact fit and it kept not fitting."
Luca came back to the table and sat down.
"Daniel has the phone records," he said.
"Forty-one calls between my father and Vanessa in the six weeks before the photographs arrived.
Before that, their contact was minimal.
Professional."
"Forty-one," I said.
"He also found a wire transfer.
Vanessa's personal account.
Sixty thousand dollars from a holding company my father controls.
Dated two weeks before the photographer was hired."
Marco set his mug down.
"That's not subtle," he said.
"My father didn't think he needed to be subtle.
He assumed the whole thing would be over in a week." Luca looked at me.
"He assumed you'd sign the settlement and disappear."
"And when I didn't sign—"
"He assumed you'd taken the money anyway and chosen to stay quiet." He paused.
"He has no idea the settlement page is still in that envelope."
I thought about that.
Aldric Moretti, sitting in his forty-fourth floor office, believing for eight months that he had paid me two million dollars to vanish.
Believing the matter was closed.
Believing his son's marriage had been dissolved cleanly, surgically, without mess.
"He's going to find out tonight that it isn't closed," I said.
"Yes."
Luca's phone buzzed on the table.
He looked at the screen.
"My father," he said.
He let it ring.
It rang again twenty minutes later.
Then a third time.
On the fourth call, Luca answered.
"It's late," he said.
"Where are you?" Aldric's voice was clear through the speaker — a deep, controlled voice, the kind built for rooms where other people stayed quiet.
"Somewhere safe."
"I heard you found Isabella today."
"I did."
A pause.
"Luca.
Whatever she's told you, I need you to understand that everything I did was to protect this family."
"From what?"
"From a woman who was never going to be loyal to you.
The photographs—"
"Were staged," Luca said.
"Eighteen months of planning.
Sixty thousand dollars to Vanessa.
A photographer already in position before Isabella ever met Evan Cole."
The line was silent.
"I have the phone records," Luca said.
"I have the wire transfer.
I have the forged letter and the settlement agreement with Isabella's name on a signature line she never touched."
"Luca—"
"She's eight months pregnant with my child.
Your grandchild.
And you tried to buy her away before you even knew the baby existed."
"I was protecting the Moretti name—"
"You were protecting your control over me." Luca's voice did not rise.
That was the most frightening thing about it.
"You've been managing my life since I was nineteen years old and you decided that my judgment couldn't be trusted.
You put a spy in my house.
You destroyed my marriage.
And you did it so quietly that I spent eight months believing it was my own failure."
"Everything I did—"
"Was crjme, Father.
Fraud.
Forgery.
Conspiracy." He paused.
"My lawyer will be in contact tomorrow morning."
"You would do this to your own family?"
"You did this to mine first."
He ended the call.
The kitchen was very still.
Marco's cat jumped onto the table, looked at Luca, and jumped back down.
"He'll move tonight," Luca said.
"He'll try to get to Vanessa before we do.
He'll want her story aligned with his."
"Can he?"
"Not if she's already given us the phone records voluntarily." He looked at me.
"Which is why I need you to call her."
I stared at him.
"Me?"
"She's afraid, Isabella.
She told us what she told us tonight because she's calculating which side is safer to be on.
If you call her — not me, you — and you ask her to give a formal statement, she may do it."
"Why would she listen to me?"
Luca looked at me steadily.
"Because you're the one she wronged most.
And somewhere underneath all of it, she knows it."
I picked up my phone.
Vanessa answered on the second ring.
"Isabella," she said.
Her voice was different now.
Smaller.
"I need you to give a statement," I said.
"Everything.
The photographer.
The letter.
The settlement.
All of it."
A long silence.
"If I do that," Vanessa said, "Aldric will—"
"Aldric is already calling his lawyers.
He's going to make you the architect of all of it.
You know that."
Another silence.
"He called you tonight, didn't he," I said.
"After Luca hung up on him."
The pause that followed was its own answer.
"He told you to say you acted alone," I said.
"Isabella—"
"Vanessa.
I am eight months pregnant and I have been alone for all of it because of what you did.
I am not asking you to do this for me.
I am asking you to do it before Aldric Moretti decides that the cleanest solution is to let you take the fall alone."
May you like
The line was quiet for a very long time.
Then Vanessa said, "Tell me where to go."
