Chapter 8 - THE SECRET INSIDE THE OLD FILE|
Franco read the file in his study while Luca waited beside the door.
The report was incomplete, but the meaning was unmistakable. Six years earlier, someone had paid to investigate Samantha Cooper after she began asking questions about a man named Nico Vale.
The inquiry had ended abruptly.
A handwritten note at the bottom read:
Subject may be carrying a child. Do not approach without authorization.
Franco's hands became still.
“Who ordered this?”
“We're tracing the payment. It passed through three companies, but the money originated with Wells.”
“He knew about Samantha.”
“Possibly. The timing suggests someone told him you were involved with a woman in Queens.”
Franco stood and walked to the window.
He remembered the night he had left Samantha. He had been told that his brother was under threat and that the safest choice was to disappear. He had believed that ending the relationship without explanation would keep her outside the conflict.
Now he wondered whether someone had deliberately made that decision for him.
“Find the man who handled the inquiry,” he ordered. “I want to know who received the reports and where the original files are.”
Luca hesitated.
“There's something else.”
Franco turned.
“The associate who arranged your departure was not acting alone. Someone inside the family gave him Samantha's address.”
“Who?”
“We don't know yet.”
Franco's face hardened.
He had spent six years assuming the danger came from outside the Richetti organization. If someone inside had known about Samantha, then the boy's existence was not simply a secret discovered at the restaurant.
It was a secret someone had tried to control from the beginning.
Meanwhile, Samantha had taken Tyler to a children's specialist recommended by Helen. The appointment confirmed what she already understood: Tyler experienced certain sounds and crowded environments intensely, and he benefited from predictable routines, quiet spaces, and clear communication.
The specialist did not treat his humming as a flaw.
“It's one of the ways he regulates himself,” she explained. “The goal isn't to take that away. It's to help him feel safe enough that he has more ways to communicate when he needs them.”
Samantha felt tears prick her eyes.
For years, strangers had treated Tyler's silence as evidence of bad parenting. The specialist treated it as a child telling the world something in the only way he could.
On the drive home, Tyler held a small visual schedule the specialist had given him.
“First lunch,” he said, touching the picture. “Then trains.”
“That's right.”
“Then Daddy?”
Samantha glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
“If he finishes his work.”
Tyler thought about that.
“Daddy works too much.”
She almost laughed.
“You noticed that, huh?”
“He looks sad when phone rings.”
The observation stayed with her.
That evening, Samantha confronted Franco about the investigation.
“You knew someone was watching me six years ago.”
“I didn't know.”
“But someone who worked with you did.”
“Yes.”
“And you disappeared without telling me why.”
Franco nodded.
“I believed I was protecting you. I didn't know someone had found you. That's not an excuse. I should have left a message, a warning, anything.”
“You should have trusted me enough to let me decide what risks I was willing to take.”
“I know.”
She searched his face for defensiveness, but none appeared.
“Will you tell me if you discover that someone in your family knew about Tyler?”
“Immediately.”
“Even if it makes you look terrible?”
“Especially then.”
Samantha wanted to believe him.
She was beginning to fear that she did.
That night, Tyler woke from a nightmare and called for his mother. Samantha found him sitting in bed, humming so rapidly that he could barely breathe.
She held him gently and sang the lullaby.
After a moment, a second voice joined hers.
Franco had appeared in the doorway.
He did not approach until Tyler held out one small hand.
Then he sat beside the bed and sang the final verse his mother had taught him.
Tyler listened, slowly relaxing.
When the song ended, he whispered something Samantha had never heard him say before.
“Don't disappear.”
Franco bowed his head.
“I won't.”
But down in the street, a car was parked with its lights off.
Inside it, a man was recording the song.
May you like
And when he finished, he sent the audio to Brandon Wells with one sentence.
Confirmed. The boy is his.
