Chapter 7 - The Woman Who Gave Him Away
Matteo traveled to Vermont with Aleandro three days later.
The farmhouse stood beyond a frozen field, small and white beneath the winter sky.
An older woman opened the door before they knocked.
Elena Russo had Matteo’s eyes.
She saw the birthmark near his collar and covered her mouth.
“My son.”
Matteo did not move.
For thirty years, he had believed Isabella was his mother.
For three days, he had believed he had no connection to the Morettis.
Now the truth had changed again.
“You knew where I was,” he said.
Elena nodded.
“All these years?”
“Yes.”
“And you stayed away.”
Tears filled her eyes.
“Lorenzo threatened everyone I loved.”
“He was my father.”
“Yes.”
“Did he love you?”
“He loved possession.”
Aleandro understood the answer.
Elena invited them inside.
She had kept a box of photographs.
Lorenzo visiting her apartment.
Lorenzo holding newborn Matteo.
Isabella standing beside Elena in the hospital corridor.
The two women had not been enemies in the way Vittorio described.
They had made an agreement.
Isabella’s newborn son had died hours after delivery.
Lorenzo feared scandal and weakness.
At the same hospital, Elena had given birth to Lorenzo’s child.
When Lorenzo demanded that Elena surrender the baby, Isabella intervened.
“She said she would raise you as her own if Lorenzo allowed me to live,” Elena told Matteo.
“You agreed?”
“I was twenty-two. I had no money. Lorenzo controlled the hospital, the police, and the judge who signed the papers.”
“You could have found me later.”
“I tried.”
She showed him letters returned unopened.
Photographs taken outside his school.
A birthday card never delivered.
“Vittorio came to my apartment when you were six months old. He placed a gun on the table and told me the next time I approached you, the bullet would be for you.”
Matteo sat down.
The anger in his face did not disappear.
But it changed shape.
Elena had not abandoned him freely.
She had been removed from his life.
“Why did Sophia find you?”
“My old friend kept one photograph. Sophia recognized Lorenzo.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“Yes.”
“She promised to help me contact you after the wedding.”
Matteo looked toward Aleandro.
“That is why Vittorio needed the wedding stopped.”
If Sophia became Aleandro’s wife, she would gain enough influence to expose Matteo’s origins without being easily silenced.
Vittorio feared more than succession.
He feared Elena’s evidence.
She possessed recordings of Lorenzo and Vittorio discussing the deaths of several rivals, including Aleandro’s father’s role in creating the violent system Vittorio later expanded.
Matteo returned to New York with Elena.
Isabella met them privately at the estate.
The two mothers stood in the same room for the first time in nearly three decades.
Isabella approached Matteo.
“I wanted to tell you.”
“When?”
“I do not know.”
“That is another way of saying never.”
She accepted the words.
“I loved you from the moment they placed you in my arms.”
“You knew Lorenzo was my father.”
“Yes.”
“And Aleandro?”
“He never knew.”
“Why call me adopted?”
“To hide the affair and protect Elena.”
Matteo looked at both women.
“Every person who claimed to protect me also decided I could not survive the truth.”
No one answered.
He left the room.
Aleandro found him later in the old garage.
Matteo sat inside their father’s restored car.
“Do you remember when we stole this at fifteen?” he asked.
“You drove it into the fountain.”
“You told Father it was your idea.”
“It was.”
“No. It was mine.”
“You were already his favorite target.”
Matteo looked through the windshield.
“Maybe you knew before everyone else that being brothers was not about being treated equally.”
Aleandro leaned against the car.
“What will you do?”
“I do not know.”
“You do not have to choose between them today.”
“I have two mothers and trust neither.”
“That seems reasonable.”
Matteo laughed once.
Then his expression became serious.
“What about Sophia?”
Aleandro had allowed her to remain at the city apartment while she recovered.
They spoke daily about the baby.
They did not speak about the wedding.
“I love her,” he said.
“But?”
“I do not know whether I can marry someone who built secret meetings around me.”
“She was trying to protect us.”
“So was Isabella.”
Matteo nodded.
Protection without consent.
The Moretti family’s favorite form of control.
That evening, Sophia asked Aleandro to meet her in the greenhouse.
The same place where Vittorio had threatened her.
She stood among winter roses wearing a simple gray coat.
No diamonds.
No satin.
No performance.
“I am leaving the engagement ring,” she said.
She placed it on the stone table.
Aleandro looked at it.
“You want to end this?”
“I want to stop pretending the wedding should continue because the baby is yours.”
He remained silent.
“I love you,” she continued. “But I lied. Fear explains it. It does not erase it.”
“What do you want?”
“To rebuild trust without a deadline, a ballroom, or three hundred witnesses.”
“And if we cannot?”
“Then we raise our child honestly, apart.”
It was the bravest thing she had said.
Aleandro picked up the ring.
He did not return it to her finger.
He placed it in his pocket.
“No wedding,” he said.
Sophia nodded, though tears filled her eyes.
“Not yet.”
May you like
The words left a narrow door open.
For the first time, neither of them tried to force it wider.
