Chapter 2 - The Widow I Never Knew
There are secrets people keep because they are ashamed.
Nicholas had kept his because he was terrified.
“Tessa was pregnant?” I asked.
Mrs. Dorothy nodded.
My first instinct was anger.
Not at Tessa.
At everyone.
At Nicholas.
At Dorothy.
At the nine years stolen from me.
“How much did you know?”
“Only what Tessa told me.”
Nicholas had met Tessa while she worked evenings at a small rehabilitation clinic in Cambridge. She was twenty-six. He was thirty-one and already deeply involved in the Moretti organization.
He fell in love with her.
Then he did something nobody in my family had ever done.
He decided to leave.
Three weeks before the harbor explosion, Nicholas and Tessa married quietly at a courthouse in Vermont.
No Morettis.
No security.
No celebration.
Just two witnesses.
“He planned to tell you after he got her somewhere safe,” Dorothy said.
“He thought I’d stop him?”
“He thought someone would stop him.”
The night of the explosion, Nicholas changed vehicles ten minutes before his SUV reached the harbor tunnel.
He did it because someone called and warned him.
Minutes later, the SUV exploded.
The two men inside died.
Nicholas escaped.
He went directly to Tessa.
“He was injured,” Dorothy continued. “Badly.”
“Why not a hospital?”
“He believed his medical records would be watched.”
For eleven days, Tessa treated him inside a rented apartment.
That was when the photograph had been taken.
The day before Nicholas died.
I stopped breathing.
“He survived the explosion and died eleven days later?”
Dorothy nodded.
“Infection. Internal injuries. He made Tessa promise she would disappear.”
I looked down at the message again.
Vincent must never know about the baby.
“Where is the child?”
Dorothy’s eyes filled.
“His name is Eli.”
“How old?”
“Eight.”
My brother had a son.
For eight years, somewhere in the same city, Nicholas’s child had been growing up without knowing me.
Then another thought hit me.
“Tessa worked under my roof for four years.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Dorothy slowly shook her head.
“That is the part I never understood.”
She reached into her pocket.
“Tessa left this with me six months ago. She said to give it to you only if she disappeared suddenly.”
It was a folded piece of paper.
One sentence had been written inside.
May you like
I did not come to Vincent’s house looking for protection.
Someone sent me there.
