Chapter 8 - THE MOTHER WHO CHOSE THE WRONG SIDE AGAIN
My mother had betrayed me twice.
Maybe three times.
By then, I had stopped counting.
We reached St. Catherine’s Hospital just before midnight.
Vincent’s security team found the maternity archive empty.
A locked cabinet had been forced open.
Emily’s original records were gone.
So was my mother.
I called her.
No answer.
Again.
Nothing.
Then a text arrived.
CLAIRE, PLEASE DON’T FOLLOW ME.
I laughed bitterly.
Vincent looked at the screen.
“Where would she go?”
“I don’t know.”
My father did.
We found him sitting alone in the hospital chapel.
He looked twenty years older.
“Where is Mom?”
He closed his eyes.
“Anthony promised to protect Sophia.”
“From what?”
“The murder investigation.”
Vincent’s face hardened.
“Sophia is a witness.”
“Anthony said federal prosecutors could charge her as an accomplice for staying silent.”
“Possible,” Madison said, “but unlikely if she cooperates.”
Dad rubbed his face.
“Your mother panicked.”
“So she helped Anthony?”
“She thinks she’s helping Sophia.”
I stared at him.
“Of course she does.”
His eyes filled.
“Claire…”
“No.”
I was tired of being asked to understand.
“You chose Sophia when I was giving birth.”
He looked away.
“You helped erase Emily.”
Silence.
“You let me spend seven years believing none of you cared whether she existed.”
His voice broke.
“I was wrong.”
“Yes.”
There was power in saying it without comforting him afterward.
Vincent stood beside me, silent.
I appreciated that.
Dad looked at him.
“Anthony told your mother there was something in Emily’s hospital records that could destroy the Moretti family.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Madison began reviewing digitized hospital files.
Then she stopped.
“This.”
A neonatal blood screening.
Emily had undergone routine testing at birth.
Vincent’s blood type was AB positive.
Mine was O positive.
Emily was A positive.
Nothing unusual.
But attached to the neonatal panel was an additional genetic marker test.
Requested privately.
“Who ordered that?” I asked.
Madison enlarged the signature.
Giovanni Moretti.
Vincent frowned.
“My grandfather tested Emily?”
“Not paternity.”
“What then?”
Madison scrolled.
A rare hereditary cardiac mutation.
Positive.
Vincent looked confused.
“What is it?”
I knew.
Because Emily had been monitored for a mild heart rhythm irregularity since infancy.
Her doctors in Boston had never found a cause.
Madison looked at Vincent.
“The mutation is carried through your paternal line.”
“So?”
“So Giovanni, Carlo, and you were all tested.”
My stomach tightened.
“And?”
“Giovanni was positive.”
“Carlo?”
“Negative.”
Vincent stopped breathing.
Madison looked at him carefully.
“You’re positive.”
The implication arrived slowly.
Vincent shook his head.
“No.”
“If Carlo was your biological father, you could not have inherited this particular mutation from Giovanni through him.”
Silence.
Vincent stared at the report.
“My father wasn’t my father?”
Madison said nothing.
He looked physically shaken.
Then my father whispered from the pew:
“That’s what Anthony wanted buried.”
We all turned.
“What do you know?”
He looked terrified.
“Your mother told me once.”
Vincent’s voice sharpened.
“My mother?”
Dad nodded.
“Before she died.”
“Tell me.”
“She said Carlo raised you.”
“Raised me?”
“But he wasn’t the man who fathered you.”
Vincent’s face turned cold.
“Who was?”
Dad looked at me.
Then at Vincent.
Finally, he said:
“Giovanni.”
Nobody moved.
Vincent’s grandfather was actually his biological father.
Which meant Carlo had been his half brother.
And Anthony…
Vincent looked at Madison.
“What does that make Anthony?”
She answered quietly.
“Your biological half brother.”
The room went silent.
Then Vincent’s phone rang.
Anthony.
He answered.
“Where is Claire’s mother?”
Anthony laughed.
“Finally asking the right question.”
“Let her go.”
“You want her?”
“Yes.”
“Bring me Giovanni’s letter.”
Vincent’s jaw tightened.
“And if I don’t?”
Anthony’s voice became cold.
“Then Claire loses her mother before sunrise.”
May you like
A pause.
“And you lose the only person alive who can prove who your real father was.”
Related Stories
