Chapter 8: Aldric
Aldric Moretti did not come quietly.
That was not a surprise.
What surprised me was how long it took before he understood that quiet was the only option left to him.
Daniel filed the initial complaint on a Thursday.
By Friday afternoon, Aldric's legal team had responded with a counter-filing — a dense, aggressive document arguing that Isabella Moretti had voluntarily abandoned the marital home, accepted the terms of a verbal separation agreement, and had deliberately concealed a pregnancy to leverage a financial settlement.
Luca read it at Marco's kitchen table.
He set it down without a word and called Daniel.
"He's going after the baby," I said.
"He's trying to," Luca said.
"He won't get there."
"How do you know?"
"Because everything he just filed is built on the assumption that you acted alone.
That you forged the letter yourself.
That you staged the photographs." He looked at me.
"Vanessa's statement makes that impossible to sustain."
"He'll say she's lying."
"He can say it.
He can't explain the wire transfer.
He can't explain forty-one phone calls in six weeks.
He can't explain why his personal assistant paid a photographer from her own account two weeks before photographs of his daughter-in-law appeared on his son's desk." Luca paused.
"He built this carefully.
But he built it to stay hidden.
The moment it came into the light, it was always going to fall apart."
Three days later, Daniel called.
"Aldric's team has requested a meeting," he said.
"No lawyers present.
Just Aldric and Luca."
"No," Luca said.
"He's insisting."
"Then he can insist." A pause.
"If he wants to talk, he talks in a room with both our legal teams present and a transcript being made.
Those are my terms."
The meeting was scheduled for the following Tuesday.
I was not invited.
Luca asked if I wanted to be there.
I thought about it for a long time.
"Yes," I said.
He looked at me.
"Not to say anything," I said.
"I just want him to see me."
The conference room at Hargrove & Fenn was the same one where Vanessa had given her statement.
The same long table, the same strong coffee, the same view of Lexington Avenue.
Aldric Moretti walked in at two o'clock exactly.
He was seventy-one years old and he looked it less than most men his age.
Silver-haired, straight-backed, wearing a suit that had cost more than my Brooklyn apartment's monthly rent.
He had Luca's gray eyes but none of Luca's warmth behind them.
He saw me before he sat down.
His gaze dropped to my stomach.
Something moved across his face — not guilt, not exactly, but a recalculation.
A man adjusting his model of the situation.
He sat down.
His lawyer opened a folder.
"Mr.
Moretti would like to propose a resolution," the lawyer began.
"Let him propose it himself," Luca said.
Aldric looked at his son.
"You want to burn down everything I built," he said.
"I want accountability for what you did to my wife."
"I was protecting—"
"You've said that.
Say something true instead."
Aldric's jaw tightened.
"I did not believe she was right for you.
I still don't."
"That wasn't your decision."
"Everything in this family has been my decision for fifty years.
The company.
The foundation.
The marriages.
All of it." He leaned forward slightly.
"You think I'm the villain in this story.
I think I'm the only one who was honest about what I wanted."
"You forged my signature," Luca said.
"You paid someone to destroy my marriage.
You tried to buy away my child."
"I tried to protect the family line from a woman I didn't trust."
"She had done nothing wrong."
"She would have."
The room was very still.
"That's what you told yourself," Luca said.
"That she would have.
Someday.
Eventually.
So you decided to act first." He looked at his father with something I recognized from the boutique — that cold, precise focus.
"You didn't protect the family.
You decided that your judgment mattered more than mine.
More than her life.
More than my child's right to know his father."
Aldric looked at me then.
Directly.
For the first time.
"What do you want?" he said.
I had thought about this.
I had thought about it at Marco's kitchen table, and in the middle of the night when the baby moved and I lay awake in the dark, and in the car on the way to this building.
"I want it on record," I said.
"Everything.
The photographs.
The letter.
The settlement.
All of it documented, signed, and filed.
I want Luca's name cleared.
I want my son's right to his father's name protected in writing." I paused.
"And I want you to say, out loud, in this room, that you were wrong."
Aldric stared at me.
"That's all?" he said.
"That's not nothing," I said.
A long silence.
His lawyer leaned in and murmured something.
Aldric listened without looking at him.
Then he looked at Luca.
"If I agree to this," he said, "the company stays intact."
"That depends on what Daniel decides to file," Luca said.
"That's no longer my choice to make."
"Luca—"
"You made it not my choice when you forged my name."
Another silence.
Aldric looked at me again.
Something shifted in his face — not warmth, not remorse exactly, but the look of a man who has run every remaining calculation and found that they all end the same way.
"I was wrong," he said.
The words came out flat and controlled, the way a man says something he has decided to say rather than something he feels.
But they were said.
In a room with a transcript running.
May you like
With his lawyer present and Daniel present and Luca present and me present, eight months pregnant, sitting across a conference table from the man who had tried to erase me.
They were said.
