Chapter 3 - The Man Between Us
We moved to a private room upstairs while Ms. Renee kept the twins busy with cake and a tour of the kitchen.
Luca locked the door.
“Start talking,” he told Evelyn.
She didn’t flinch. “Victor keeps off-book files. I found them when Moretti Global’s audit committee asked me to review charitable foundation expenses.”
“You never told me.”
“I wasn’t sure what I had.”
“You had my ex-wife’s mail.”
“I had one scanned envelope. No letter inside.”
I could feel the old anger rising again. “Convenient.”
Evelyn turned to me. “I understand why you don’t trust me.”
“No. You don’t.”
Her expression hardened. “Then let me earn the right to explain.”
That surprised me.
Luca paced to the window. Six years earlier, I would have known exactly what he was thinking. Now I only saw the famous CEO who could make a room nervous by becoming quiet.
“Victor handled my personal correspondence during the divorce,” he said.
“I know,” I replied. “He handled me too.”
Luca stopped.
I told him about the pregnancy. About the first ultrasound. About sitting alone in a parking garage holding two grainy images because the doctor had said, “There are two heartbeats.”
“I called your office from the car,” I said. “Victor answered.”
Luca looked sick.
“He said you were in Paris.”
“I was in Chicago.”
“I know that now.”
The silence hurt more than shouting would have.
Evelyn slid her phone across the table. “There’s more.”
On the screen was a spreadsheet. Payments. Dates. Clinic names.
I recognized one immediately.
Lakeview Reproductive Medicine.
The clinic where Luca and I had spent nearly two years trying to have a baby.
Next to the clinic’s name were six transfers from a company called Northbridge Consulting.
Luca stared at them. “Victor owns Northbridge.”
I felt my pulse in my throat.
“Why would he pay our fertility clinic?”
Evelyn zoomed in on one entry.
The payment date was three days before the test that had supposedly proved my ovarian reserve was collapsing.
May you like
Then she said the sentence that changed the shape of my past.
“Because I don’t think your infertility results were real.”
