Chapter 15
The name at the top was hers.
Norah Sofia Raines.
Her date of birth.
Her mother’s name.
The father’s name had been blacked out.
But beneath the black ink, a second name had been written in pencil.
Matteo Moretti.
Norah stopped breathing.
Mara read over her shoulder.
“No.”
Nico took one step forward.
“What is it?”
Norah held the paper out.
He saw the name.
His expression emptied.
For the first time since she had known him, Nico looked like a man who had been struck by a truth he could not negotiate with.
“No,” he said.
It was not denial.
It was recognition.
Norah turned toward him.
“You knew.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then why did you say that?”
“Because my father could not be your father.”
“Why not?”
Nico’s eyes remained fixed on the certificate.
“Because he was told you were not his.”
“Who told him?”
“Your mother.”
Norah felt the walls shift around her.
Mara took the document from her hand.
“Maybe the name was added later.”
“Maybe,” Nico said.
But he did not sound convinced.
Norah’s mother had never spoken about Norah’s father.
When Norah was young, she had asked once.
Her mother had kissed her forehead and said some stories were safer when they remained unfinished.
At the time, Norah had assumed her father had abandoned them.
Later, when she grew older, she stopped asking because she sensed the subject caused her mother pain.
Now the unanswered question stood in front of her with the Moretti name beneath it.
“Was my mother involved with your father?” Norah asked.
Nico’s face hardened, not with anger but with concentration.
“I don’t know.”
“You said he owed her.”
“I know he owed her.”
“That sounds like more than business.”
“It was.”
“What happened in 1998?”
Nico looked at the photograph on the desk.
His father stood between two people who had clearly trusted him once.
“I was born in 1994,” he said.
Norah waited.
“My brother was born in 1997.”
She had never heard Nico mention a brother.
Not once.
There had been no photographs in the penthouse, no name spoken by his relatives, no grave she had been asked to visit.
She realized suddenly that she knew almost nothing about the family whose name he carried.
“What happened to him?”
Nico’s gaze remained on the photograph.
“He disappeared.”
Mara’s hand tightened around the birth certificate.
“How old was he?”