Part 4 — On the Evening of My Engagement, I Saw Four Boys in the Restroom Who Wore My Childhood Face — My Hand Stopped at a Woman’s Voice

The address of the conservatory continued glowing on the screen for several more seconds, until the phone slipped from my hand.

Elena immediately locked the door.

“It is a trap,” she said.

“I know.”

“If you go alone, you may not return.”

“If I do not go, they may come to us.”

Niko got down from the back seat. His brothers woke up as well. All four were looking at me.

“Father, where are you going?” he asked.

My heart froze at that one word.

“To where I should have gone a long time ago,” I answered.

Cameras had been installed in the clinic’s small waiting room. Elena asked the security employee to turn on the recording. I called my lawyer, Leah Hudson.

“Leah, Vittorio threatened to kill the children.”

Silence fell for several seconds.

“Do you have evidence?”

“A recording, birth certificates, and DNA results.”

“Where are you?”

“At the clinic.”

“Stay there. I will call the police.”

“The Moretti police?”

“No, federal investigators. And Dominic, this time your family name will not protect you.”

“I do not want it to protect me either,” I told her. “I want the truth to protect them.”

Elena sent the recording to Leah. The answer came in one minute.

“Do not go alone. They are watching your car.”

I went to the window. A black SUV stood across the street. Its engine was running, although no driver could be seen inside.

At that moment I realized that my grandfather had not spent years only on blackmail. He had a plan for everything.

I went to the conservatory anyway.

But not alone.

Leah sent two undercover investigators. They were dressed like security employees and followed our car from the clinic. Elena and the children set off in another car, which was supposed to take them to a safe house on the other side of the city.

I got into the first car and held in my hands the small wooden box Elena had left me years earlier. The letters I had scratched onto the box with my own hand in childhood were still visible: “D. M.”

It was seven in the evening when the wind struck the glass ceiling of the conservatory. The Charles River glittered black below. Sloan stood at the stairs, in a white dress, holding a champagne glass.

“At last,” she told me. “I was already thinking that you had changed your mind.”

“I changed my mind.”

Her smile disappeared.

“What do you mean?”

“I have to talk to you about the engagement.”

“Now? The guests are waiting for us.”

“They will not come anymore.”

Sloan placed the glass on the table.

“This was your family’s decision.”

“It was my life.”

“You have failed to understand the difference for a long time.”

Her voice was strangely calm. Too calm.

“You knew about Elena?” I asked.

Sloan’s eyes froze for a moment.

“Do not mention that name again.”

“Why?”

“Because that woman was destroying your family.”

“What will you say about my four children?”

Sloan stepped back.

“Where are they?”

That question told me everything.

“You knew.”

“I do not know what you are talking about.”

“Then why did you ask where they are?”

Sloan took out her phone. Her fingers were trembling.

“Call Vittorio,” I told her.

“You do not understand whom you are opposing.”

“For the first time, I do.”

Footsteps sounded outside the door. Vittorio entered with two men. He was eighty years old, but his back was still straight. A golden watch chain shone on his jacket.

“Son, all this is an unpleasant misunderstanding,” he said.

“Were six years an unpleasant misunderstanding?”

“Elena disappeared.”

“You separated us.”

“I saved the family.”

“From my children?”

Vittorio’s face changed for the first time.

The investigator Leah had sent quietly switched on a recorder.

I placed my phone on the table and played the recording.

“If Dominic loves you, Elena, that does not mean you have the right to stay with him.”

Sloan fell into a chair.

Vittorio tried to stop the recording, but the investigator gripped his arm.

Then a child’s voice sounded.

“Are you my father?”

And my answer:

“Yes. If you will allow me.”

My own voice sounded strange in the room. I heard what I was saying for the first time, as if I were listening to another man. For six years I had allowed everyone to decide for me who I was. Now my voice itself was exposing me.

Vittorio lowered his head.

“I did this for the family,” he whispered.

“No,” I told him. “You did this for power.”

Sloan looked at him.

“You told me Elena was dead.”

Vittorio looked over in surprise.

“That was necessary for you.”

“You told me Dominic could not have children.”

“Sloan, be quiet.”

“You told me that after the wedding everything would pass into my family’s hands.”

Hurt and fear mixed on her face.

Sloan turned toward me.

“I did not touch the children.”

“But you knew about them.”

“I learned only today that they were alive.”

Sirens sounded outside the door.

Vittorio immediately took out his phone.

“Who are you calling?” Sloan asked.

“My lawyer.”

He dialed the number, but the call did not go through. Several seconds later the phone rang. His lawyer’s name appeared on the screen.

Vittorio answered.

“Mark, come here immediately.”

A clear man’s voice sounded from the other side. Because the room’s speaker was on, everyone heard it.

“Mr. Moretti, from now on I will no longer represent you. I am already cooperating with the investigators.”

Vittorio’s hand grew heavy.

“You cannot do this.”

“I already have.”

The call ended.

It was the first crack in the world that Vittorio always called impregnable.

The federal investigators entered several seconds later. They needed neither shouting nor drawing weapons. They had documents prepared in advance by Leah: threats to abduct the children, forged records, a list of bribed police officers, and accounts from which money for Elena’s silence had been transferred.

Vittorio looked toward me.

“If you do this, you will kill the Moretti name.”

“No,” I answered. “For the first time I will leave it where it belongs.”

They put handcuffs on him.

Sloan was left alone beneath the glass ceiling. She looked at the small ring box lying on the table.

“Did you really never love me?” she asked.

For a long time I could not answer.

“I loved you as much as a person can love a life he did not choose himself.”

She lowered her head.

“And now?”

“Now, for the first time, I am choosing my own.”

When I arrived at the safe house that night, the children were already asleep. Elena stood in the kitchen, pouring warm milk into four small glasses. The red woolen bird she had taken from her bag still lay on the table.

“Is everything over?” she asked me.

“No. Now it begins.”

She looked at me.

“Your family has a lot to lose.”

“I no longer ask anything of them.”

“Dominic, it is not that simple.”

“I know. But this time you are not alone.”

In the morning the police searched Vittorio’s house. They found Elena’s forged letter, my doctor’s falsified report, and old photographs matching the small wooden box. The heaviest thing was that in Vittorio’s study they found photographs of the four children, taken two years after their birth.

He had always watched them.

He simply had never come to them.

Several weeks later the court ordered Vittorio held in pretrial detention. Sloan testified about the accounts and conversations that her family knew about. Three Moretti businesses also closed because their accounting books turned out to be false.

I protected none of them.

Leah told me that if I kept the family fortune, the children’s safety would never come first.

“Then sell everything,” I told her.

“Everything?”

“Everything that seemed more valuable to me than them.”

Two months later we left Boston.

We bought a small house in the suburbs of Chicago, with a narrow garden beneath the windows. There was neither a guard there nor black cars stopping in the street. In the mornings the children walked to school. I worked at a local repair company, and for the first time in my life my hands became stained with oil.

I liked it.

Niko played soccer. Lucas loved drawing. Mateo asked me every evening whether I really was his father, as if he expected the answer to change. And Sandro always put his hand behind his neck when he had something to say and did not dare.

One evening, on the first day of snow, all four sat on the living-room floor. Niko handed me a sheet of paper.

A drawing of our house was on it. Five people stood at the door, and above them was a large yellow sun.

“Why isn’t Mother there?” I asked.

“Mother was drawing,” Niko told me. “You were supposed to draw yourself.”

My figure was the smallest on the paper.

“Why am I so small?”

“Because you still have to grow,” he answered seriously.

Elena laughed from the kitchen.

That night I received a message on the old phone. It was from Sloan.

“Vittorio is in prison. I lost everything. But I still remember you. If you ever return, you will find the door open.”

I read the message and put the phone on the table.

Elena asked me nothing.

“You will not answer?” she said only.

“I already answered.”

“What did you write to her?”

“Nothing.”

She nodded. That was enough.

Sometimes silence is the calmest refusal.

Several weeks later Vittorio’s lawyer called me. He offered me a deal: I would change my testimony, and in exchange I would keep part of the family fortune.

“Your children will need this money in the future,” he told me.

“My children need a father who will no longer sell their safety.”

“Think about it.”

“I thought for six years.”

I ended the call.

In the evening I placed the small wooden box on the shelf. The box Elena had left me, in which I had fit my entire past. Now it held the children’s four first teeth, a school photograph, and Niko’s drawing.

And we hung the red woolen bird on the box’s handle.

It hung slightly lowered, with a thread showing on one wing, but it still looked like a bird that was finding its way.

I went to the window.

It was snowing outside. Four small shadows were running in the yard. Elena stood at the door and called to them.

Sandro looked back, brought his hand to the back of his neck, and smiled at me.

I repeated the same movement.

This time there was no mirror.

It was my son.

And for the first time, my face no longer frightened me.