جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 13

Dawn was breaking when the freighter reached the south of France.A customs officer examined my passport.“Elise Laurent?”“That’s me.”He stamped it and handed it back.From that moment on, Elena Romano was dead at the bottom of the Atlantic.The Moretti family’s men drove me to an estate in Provence. It was registered to an offshore company, and even Dante had never known it belonged to my mother.Vineyards surrounded the property. In the cellar beneath the main house, I found artwork the Moretti family had collected over several decades.My mother’s attorney had managed the estate and its assets since her death.Now they were mine again.Gabriel Laurent oversaw the family’s affairs in France.He laid the financial records and property documents across the desk.“Ma’am, these are all the Moretti family’s legitimate assets in France.”“Don’t call me ma’am.”I opened the first file.“Call me Elena.”Gabriel didn’t ask why I had left New York or question me about the yacht explosion. He

The surgery lasted two hours.My daughter weighed barely three pounds when she was born. The nurses took her straight to the neonatal intensive care unit.When I woke up, my first question was about the baby.Gabriel sat beside my bed.“She’s very small, but the doctors say she’s stable.”I closed my eyes and finally let myself breathe.I saw my daughter for the first time through the glass of the NICU.She lay inside an incubator, surrounded by tiny tubes and wires. But her fingers were curled into a tight fist, as though she had already decided she would not surrender to this world.Dante stood at the other end of the hallway.He didn’t come inside. He simply watched her through the glass for a long time.“What’s her name?” he asked.“Sofia Moretti.”At the sound of her last name, something dimmed in his eyes.“She’s my daughter too.”“I never said she wasn’t.”“Then could she carry the Romano name?”I turned to face him.“She almost never had the chance to be born because of you.”D