Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Prescription
Elena looked away from me, staring out the tiny apartment window toward the brick alleyway below.
The rhythmic hiss-click of her portable oxygen machine was the only sound in the quiet room. Mia sat on the floor near the sofa, quietly combing the fur of her new teddy bear, occasionally glancing up at the two adults with a child's silent, perceptive awareness that something massive was happening.
"How did you find us, Dominic?" Elena asked softly, her voice weak but steady.
"The pharmacy bag," I replied, sitting down on a small wooden chair across from the sofa. "Mia was carrying your medicine on Fifty-Third Street. My security team tracked the prescription number."
Elena let out a faint, bitter laugh. "Of course. Dominic Moretti and his security team. I forgot how fast your world moves when you want something."
"Elena, answer me," I pleaded, leaning forward, resting my elbows on my knees. "Mia is six years old. You left Boston seven years ago, three weeks after I asked you to marry me. You vanished into thin air. I spent six months looking for you. I hired private investigators, checked hospitals, checked colleges..."
"Your mother paid them off, Dominic," Elena interrupted quietly, looking back at me with eyes filled with old, buried pain.
I froze. "What?"
Elena reached for a cup of water on the end table, her hand trembling so violently that half the water spilled onto her lap. I reached out instinctively to take the glass, holding it for her as she took a small sip.
"Your mother came to my apartment two days after you proposed," Elena said, her voice dropping into a flat, distant tone. "She didn't bring security guards. She came alone, carrying a thick leather folder."
I felt a cold drop of sweat trickle down my spine. My mother, Victoria Moretti, was the matriarch of the Moretti real estate dynasty—a woman whose cold, iron-willed ambition had preserved our family's fortune after my father's death.
"She showed me the bloodline trusts," Elena continued. "She showed me the corporate bylaws of the Moretti Group. She told me that if I married you—a girl from a working-class family in Maine with no connections, no money, and an incomplete degree—your uncles would use the morality clause in your father's will to strip you of your chairmanship."
"That was a lie," I growled, my jaw tightening until my teethached. "The board couldn't touch my shares!"
"I didn't know that then, Dominic!" Elena said, a flash of her old fire sparking in her dark hazel eyes. "I was twenty-one years old! I loved you so much I couldn't bear the thought of watching you lose everything you had worked your whole life to build!"
She took a ragged, shallow breath, the oxygen cannula whistling softly against her nose.
"And then... three days after she came to my apartment, I found out I was pregnant."
I looked down at Mia, who had stopped playing with her bear and was watching us intently.
"When I found out about Mia," Elena whispered, tears finally spilling over her lashes, "I went back to your mother's house in Greenwich. I thought... I foolishly thought that a grandchild would change her mind. That she would see we were a real family."
"What did she do?" I asked, my voice dropping into a dangerous, lethal register.
"She offered me five hundred thousand dollars to sign a non-disclosure agreement and get an abortion," Elena said, her voice cracking with pure, unadulterated grief. "She told me that a bastard child born to a nobody would never carry the Moretti name."
The room went completely, suffocatingly still.
The air in my lungs felt like broken glass. My mother—the woman I had visited every Sunday, the woman who sat on the boards of three Manhattan children's hospitals—had offered to buy the life of my daughter and drive her mother into hiding.
"I didn't take her money," Elena whispered, reaching down to touch Mia's soft blond curls. "I took my savings—less than four thousand dollars—and caught a bus to New York. I changed my phone number, deleted my social media, and got a job working the front desk at a dental clinic in Queens."
"Why didn't you write to me?" I choked out, covering my face with my hands. "Why didn't you send a letter? A sign? Anything?"
"Because your mother threatened to have my father's pension revoked," Elena said softly. "My father was dying of lung cancer in Maine. His medical care depended entirely on his union pension. Your mother owned the firm that managed the union trust. If I contacted you, she promised to cut off his benefits."
I sat in the quiet apartment, listening to the heavy roar of the 7 train outside the window, feeling the absolute, crushing weight of a seven-year lie.
"I didn't know," I whispered, reaching out to grasp Elena's pale, cold hand. "Elena, on my life, on my soul... I swear to you I didn't know."
Elena looked down at our joined hands. "I know you didn't, Dominic. I knew the man I loved would never have let that happen. But by the time my father passed away three years ago... I was alone. Mia was two. And I was already getting sick."
I looked at the stacks of unpaid bills on the table, then at the prescription bottle of Digoxin sitting beside her water glass.
"What is the diagnosis, Elena?" I asked quietly.
Elena looked into my eyes, her expression settling into a quiet, heartbreaking acceptance.
"Peripartum cardiomyopathy," she said. "A severe weakening of the heart muscle that began when Mia was born. It was manageable for a few years with medication. But six months ago... my heart function dropped below fifteen percent."
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She touched Mia's small shoulder gently.
"I don't have much time left, Dominic," Elena whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the oxygen concentrator. "The doctors at Queens General told me three weeks ago that without a heart transplant... I won't survive the winter."
