Chapter 5: What the Letter Said
He didn't speak for a long time.
Alessandro sat very still, the way expensive things sometimes do — like stillness itself was something he had learned to use.
His eyes stayed on mine.
I didn't look away, because looking away felt like the worst thing I could do.
"Say that again," he said finally.
"My mother's name was Catherine Calloway.
She worked as a private events coordinator in Chicago in the late nineties.
She and your father had a relationship for almost two years.
She never told him she was pregnant.
She raised me alone, and she never told me either." I kept my voice steady.
"She left a letter.
Sealed, addressed to me, to be delivered by her lawyer — Marcus Hale — on my twenty-fifth birthday.
Marcus never delivered it.
He called me instead, two weeks before my birthday, and told me what was in it.
He told me your father had signed a private paternity acknowledgment before he died.
He told me if that document became known, it would complicate the Vitali estate."
"Complicate," Alessandro repeated.
The word came out flat.
"That was his word."
"And you believed him."
"I had no reason not to.
I had no way to verify anything.
I didn't have the letter.
I still don't have the letter.
All I had was a phone call from a lawyer telling me my entire understanding of my own life was wrong." I pressed my hands together on the table.
"I panicked.
I ran.
I changed my name back to Emma, which is what my mother called me when I was small.
I got a job.
I tried to disappear."
"And then you appeared at my gala."
"I wasn't there to find you.
I was there because a woman I worked with at the catering company called in sick and I needed the extra shift." I watched his face.
"I didn't know you would be there.
I didn't know what you looked like.
I'd never looked you up because I was trying not to think about any of it."
Alessandro stood up.
He walked to the window — the same window Liam had stood at an hour earlier — and looked down at the street.
"The black car is gone," he said quietly.
"It was there this morning," Liam said from the kitchen.
"I know.
I had it removed." Alessandro turned around.
"It was Marcus's.
He's been watching this address for eleven days." He looked at me.
"When he called me this morning, he told me you were planning to go public with a paternity claim.
He said you had fabricated a document.
He said you were a con artist who had targeted me deliberately." A pause.
"He was very detailed.
Very prepared.
That is what made me certain he was lying."
"How?"
"Because a man telling the truth does not need that much preparation at six in the morning." He came back to the table and sat down.
"I have been aware of my father's history.
Not all of it.
But enough to know that a woman named Catherine Calloway existed, and that her name appeared in a set of private documents my father's personal attorney gave me after he died." He stopped.
"I didn't know she had a daughter.
I didn't know the daughter was you."
The room went very quiet.
"You knew about my mother," I said.
"I knew she existed.
I knew my father had cared about her.
I knew he had ended the relationship because of pressure from his first wife — my half-brothers' mother — who threatened to destroy the business if he didn't." His jaw tightened.
"My father made a choice.
He chose the empire.
I have spent four years deciding what I think of that choice."
"And what do you think?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I think he was wrong," Alessandro said.
"And I think Marcus Hale has been protecting that wrong decision for twenty-five years, and now that you exist and are carrying a child, he is terrified of what unravels if the truth comes out."
Liam set his coffee mug down.
"So what does he actually want?"
"He wants Elizabeth to sign a document relinquishing any claim to the Vitali estate and agreeing never to pursue a paternity case." Alessandro's eyes stayed on me.
"He told me he already has her signature on a preliminary non-disclosure.
He said she signed it two years ago."
I felt the cold move through me before I understood why.
"I never signed anything," I said.
Alessandro reached into his jacket and placed a single folded page on the table between us.
I opened it.
My name — Elizabeth Calloway — was at the bottom.
The signature looked exactly like mine.
The date was two years ago, four days after Marcus's phone call.
My hands started shaking again.
"That's not my signature," I said.
"I never saw this document.
I never signed this."
Alessandro watched my face carefully.
Then he nodded once, as if something had been confirmed.
May you like
"I know," he said.
"Which means Marcus Hale forged it."
