Chapter 3 - EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER
Mara had not planned to leave the night Dominic found the suitcase.
She had planned to tell him she was pregnant.
The test was tucked into the pocket of her robe. She stood in their bedroom, waiting while he finished a call in the hall.
Then she heard Celeste’s voice downstairs.
“She found the ledger,” Celeste said.
Dominic’s father, Vittorio, answered too softly for Mara to make out the words.
A month earlier, Mara had found records showing payments from a Vascari shipping company to a private security firm. At first, she thought the company was hiding debts. Then an accountant who had promised to meet her stopped returning calls. The next day, his office had been emptied.
Mara had told Dominic she was worried. He had promised to look into it.
Now Celeste was downstairs with his father, talking about the ledger as if Mara were the problem.
Mara slipped the pregnancy test into her pocket and walked to the landing.
Vittorio saw her first. “How much did you hear?”
“Enough. Where’s the accountant?”
Celeste offered a gentle smile. “Mara, you’ve misunderstood.”
“I have copies of the payments.”
The smile disappeared.
Dominic came in through the front door, shaking rain from his coat. He saw the three of them facing one another and stopped.
“What happened?”
“Your wife took confidential records,” Vittorio said.
“Those records have people’s names on them,” Mara said. “Where are those people?”
Dominic looked between them. “Let’s talk in my office.”
Celeste stepped forward. “She’s been meeting with a reporter.”
“That’s a lie.”
Vittorio held out his phone. On it was a photo of Mara outside a café with a man she had never seen before. The image had been cropped close enough to make them look as though they were speaking.
“Who is he?” Dominic asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Then tell me why your car was outside that café.”
“I bought coffee there.”
“You never mentioned the records had left this house.”
Mara felt the distance open between them. She could have shown him the test. She could have asked him to choose her and the baby over his father.
But Vittorio and Celeste were watching. She had heard enough downstairs to know she needed the records somewhere they couldn’t reach them.
“I’m leaving for a few days,” she said.
Dominic’s face closed. “If you walk out with company files, I can’t protect you.”
“You haven’t even asked who needs protecting.”
She went upstairs for a bag. When she came back down, Dominic stood by the door. For one second she thought he might stop her to hear her out.
Instead, he moved aside.
Three days later, Mara tried to call him. A woman answered his phone.
“He knows about the pregnancy,” Celeste told her. “He wants you to stop using it to get back in.”
Mara had gripped the sink until her fingers hurt. “Put Dominic on.”
“He said there’s nothing left to discuss.”
Celeste ended the call.
Mara never knew that Dominic’s phone had been sitting unattended on his office desk.
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And Dominic never saw the voicemail she left afterward.
Someone else deleted it.
