All Chapters of Love, Billed by the Hour: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Sophia hadn't burst into our marriage out of nowhere.She and Gabriel grew up on the same street in Brooklyn and were each other's first love at fifteen. His father was in prison then, his mother had died of illness, and he washed dishes at a restaurant and finished prep school on scholarships.Sophia saw no end to the poverty. The summer Gabriel received his acceptance letter from Columbia, she climbed into the sports car of the developer Victor Bellini and never looked back.A year later, I met Gabriel at the university's legal aid center. He had a shirt washed pale, a pair of leather shoes coming unglued at the soles, and an old piano in storage in a basement.My father guaranteed his first apartment, and my mother cooked for him for four years. I sold the sapphire brooch my grandmother had left me to pay for his first bar exam prep course. The first time he won a moot court, he ran off the stage and hugged me, and said he would never let me lose in this life.He truly had loved me,

A month before Noah's surgery, Sophia's apartment exploded.Gabriel had security seal off the block first, then brought her and Luca back to our townhouse. He didn't decide on his own. He stood on the porch and asked me, "Seventy-two hours at most. The basement safe room is bulletproof and has its own exit. I'll pay a separate fee for the space."His restraint almost reminded me of before."Two hundred thousand dollars," I said.The money arrived quickly.The first night passed without incident. The next day I brought Noah home from a checkup and found the lock on his door had been changed.The housekeeper, plainly uncomfortable, said security had received instructions: the street-facing bedrooms carried a sniper risk, and all the children had to be moved. Luca had severe claustrophobia and couldn't stay in the basement, so he had moved into Noah's room. Noah's things had been carried into the storage room.Gabriel was delivering closing arguments in federal court, his phone off.Sophi

After we got home, Noah ran a high fever.When I changed him into his pajamas, I saw a dense cluster of needle marks on the inside of his arm. They weren't from the hospital. They were too shallow, with no trace of antiseptic.At first Noah wouldn't talk. Only after I promised never to let him see Luca alone again did he take an empty syringe from under his pillow."Luca said it was a bravery game. Every time he stuck me, he gave me twenty dollars.""Why did you want the money?"He dragged a cookie tin out from under the bed. Inside were crumpled bills, birthday checks, and a children's savings passbook, totaling forty-eight thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars."I wanted to buy Dad for one day," he said. "The day of the surgery, from when I go in until I wake up. I asked his assistant. A whole day costs about fifty thousand dollars."That was the moment my heart broke, all the way through.I gave the syringe to Gabriel. He called in the doctor and security at once, ordered blood

By the time Gabriel got back to the hospital, the surgery was over.At the warehouse he had found only a phone playing a recording. The so-called gunfight was firecrackers in an abandoned oil drum. The witness had never been taken hostage, and Sophia and Luca were nowhere near the place.At last he realized someone had hacked his email, his seal system, and his phone all at once.But he was still too late.Noah had been transferred to a rehabilitation center registered under a charitable foundation. My name had vanished from the hospital system, and the clothes, photographs, and design drafts at home had all been cleared out.I kept only three things.Before I left, I walked through the empty house one more time.The pencil lines marking Noah's height were still on the kitchen wall. Beside the one from his fourth birthday, Gabriel had written "little lawyer." Beside the one from his sixth, "future musician." The newest line had no date, because that day he had taken a call from Sophia,

Sophia's trial lasted nine months.She was charged with attempted murder, cybercrime, fabricating evidence, and extortion. The truth the trial uncovered was dirtier than I had imagined.After she left Gabriel and his poverty, she had married Victor by choice, not by force. She had actively helped her husband launder money, and the divorce came only because their assets were frozen. The photographs of domestic abuse had been made by a film makeup artist. The stalkers were actors she had hired.Before returning to New York, she had researched every part of our lives. She knew I had stopped working, knew Noah was ill, and knew that what Gabriel could least refuse was not an old love but Antonio's dying wish.She had even tampered with my emails.What I wrote to Gabriel, "I'm afraid we'll lose each other," arrived on his side as a threat: see her again and I'll make the Moretti family pay.What he wrote to me, "After the trial we'll leave New York together," arrived on my side as an order: