Chapter 5 - THE SON VINCENT CHOSE ANYWAY
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
Ethan looked eighteen and eight years old at the same time.
Vincent took one step toward him.
Ethan moved back.
“Don’t.”
Vincent stopped immediately.
That hurt to watch.
Sophia reached for her son.
“Ethan, listen to me.”
“No.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it.”
Her composure finally cracked.
The original DNA test from eighteen years earlier had been falsified.
Vincent had believed Ethan was his son because Sophia had produced laboratory results showing paternity.
The test in Ethan’s hand had been performed privately two years ago.
Sophia had known the truth since then.
Maybe longer.
“Who is my father?” Ethan asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Mom.”
Vincent’s voice was dangerously quiet.
“Tell him.”
Sophia looked at Vincent.
Then said the name.
“Luca.”
Vincent closed his eyes.
Luca Moretti.
His younger brother.
Dead nineteen years.
I knew enough to understand immediately.
Luca had died in a car accident six months before Ethan was born.
Sophia had been dating him secretly.
After his death, she was pregnant, unmarried, and frightened she would lose access to the Moretti family.
So she chose the surviving brother.
Vincent.
“You told Claire I slept with you,” Vincent said.
Sophia’s jaw tightened.
“You were never going to believe me without proof.”
“So you manufactured proof.”
“You raised Ethan.”
“I would have helped my brother’s child without destroying my marriage.”
That sentence hit me hard.
I had spent eighteen years believing Vincent had betrayed me physically.
Had he?
I looked at him.
He understood the question.
“I never slept with her.”
My throat tightened.
“Not once?”
“Never.”
Sophia had shown me photographs.
Vincent entering her apartment.
Vincent holding newborn Ethan.
A hotel receipt with both names.
All carefully arranged pieces of a story.
“What about the hotel?” I asked.
Vincent frowned.
“What hotel?”
Sophia looked away.
And I knew.
Another fabrication.
My marriage had not ended because my husband had another child.
It ended because someone had convinced both of us that the other had already chosen a different life.
Ethan began to cry silently.
Vincent crossed the room.
This time, Ethan didn’t back away.
Vincent put both hands on his shoulders.
“DNA doesn’t change eighteen years.”
Ethan looked at him.
“I’m not your son.”
“Yes, you are.”
The certainty in Vincent’s voice broke something open in all of us.
“You are Luca’s biological son.”
He swallowed.
“And you are my son because I raised you, because I love you, and because no laboratory gets to erase eighteen years of bedtime stories, terrible baseball games, and arguments about your car.”
Ethan laughed through tears.
Then Noah appeared beside them.
He looked at Ethan.
“For what it’s worth, apparently being his biological son mostly gets you complicated paperwork.”
Ethan laughed harder.
For the first time, the two boys looked like brothers.
Then Sophia whispered:
“You still don’t understand why I had to keep Claire’s child hidden.”
Vincent turned.
She looked at Noah.
“Because the Moretti trust doesn’t belong to Ethan.”
Her eyes became cold.
May you like
“It belongs to Vincent’s first biological son.”
And on Noah’s eighteenth birthday, control of nearly half the Moretti fortune had legally become his.
