Part 6
Eleanor looked at him through tears.
“I made a terrible decision for what I believed was a merciful reason. I took her with me.”
Dominic stood.
Eleanor flinched.
He saw it.
Whatever world Dominic Moretti controlled, whatever reputation his name carried, there was suddenly only an old woman standing before a grieving father and expecting punishment.
Instead, Dominic asked, “Did you hurt her?”
“No.”
“Did you know who she was?”
“No.”
“Did you ever try to find out?”
“For months. Missing-child notices, hospitals, community centers. I never saw her photograph. When she recovered, she remembered almost nothing.”
“Why Lily?”
Eleanor covered her mouth.
“My daughter’s name. She died when she was twenty-three.”
Dominic looked away.
Eleanor had lost a daughter.
Then found one.
He understood enough about grief to understand what that could do to a human heart.
“She began calling me Grandma,” Eleanor said. “I told myself I would correct her when she became stronger. Then a week became a month. A month became a year.”
“You should have kept looking.”
“I know.”
“You should have reported her properly.”
“I know.”
“I spent three years burying an empty coffin in my head every night.”
Eleanor lowered her face.
“I know.”
Dominic’s anger rose, then collided with an image he could not escape.
Anna cold beside a river.
Anna feverish.
Anna frightened.
And this woman—hungry, homeless, nearly sixty-five—carrying her somewhere warm.
Dominic sat again.
“You saved her.”
Eleanor looked up.
“You saved my child.”
“I also kept her from you.”
“You made mistakes afterward.”
His voice broke.
“But my daughter is alive because, on the worst morning of your own life, you refused to walk past a child who wasn’t yours.”
Eleanor began sobbing.
Dominic reached across the table.
He took her hand.
“We do the test.”
She nodded.
“And if she is Anna?”
Dominic looked toward the ceiling where Lily slept in the room she had once known.
“Then she gets her father back.”
Eleanor’s face crumpled.
“And she keeps her grandmother.”
The next morning Dominic opened the grand piano in his parlor.
Lily watched from the carpet.
He played a simple melody he had written when Anna was a baby.
Halfway through, Lily’s face changed.
Tears appeared before she seemed to understand why.
“You played that.”
Dominic stopped.
Lily touched her chest.
“When I couldn’t sleep.”
His hands trembled above the keys.
“What did I say afterward?”
She stared at him.
Then memory broke through.
“You called me your little star explorer.”
Dominic covered his mouth.
Lily took one step.
Then another.
“Daddy?”
He was on his knees before she reached him.
She crashed into his arms.
Dominic Moretti, the man whose voice could silence a room full of dangerous men, held his six-year-old daughter against his chest and wept so hard he could not speak.
Eleanor knelt beside them.
Anna—Lily—reached one arm toward her.
“Grandma too.”
So Eleanor joined them.
For several minutes, three people held one another in the middle of a room that had been silent for three years.
The DNA results arrived the following morning.
99.99 percent.
Anna Moretti was alive.
Dominic immediately called his attorney.
“There will be no quiet transfer that makes Eleanor disappear,” he said.
His lawyer hesitated. “Dominic, legally—”
“I know what the law says. I am telling you what I want.”
“And what is that?”
“My daughter protected from public attention. My parental rights restored correctly. And Eleanor recognized as part of Anna’s family.”
“You trust her?”
“She saved Anna twice. Once from the river. Once from believing nobody wanted her.”
Dominic ended the call.
He did not know that Marcus Bell was standing thirty floors below, preparing to betray him for the last time.
Marcus had been Dominic’s friend since they were teenagers.
He had eaten at Dominic’s mother’s table.
He had stood beside Dominic at his wedding.
He had attended Anna’s christening.
May you like
Most importantly, he had controlled financial accounts connected to Dominic’s shipping companies for nearly fifteen years.
Claire had discovered irregularities before her death.
