Chapter 4 - The Man Who Signed the Death Certificate
I went back to my apartment with Gabriel's trusted security man in a plain blue pickup truck. Matteo Bellini was forty-five, built like a refrigerator, and so careful with Elsie's car seat that he checked the installation against the instruction label. That single gesture did more to calm me than anything he said.
Gabriel stayed at Ruth's house with Lily while Naomi Brooks arranged immediate legal and medical protection. I could understand why he refused to leave. He had just recovered the eight months everyone stole from him. Even the thought of losing sight of his daughter again made him go pale.
Matteo parked two streets from my building. My basement apartment faced a concrete retaining wall and had one window high enough that Elsie liked to stand on a chair to see people's shoes. I had lived there since my husband walked out, when Elsie was eleven months old. It wasn't much, but every toy and photograph in it had been earned honestly.
The front lock looked untouched. Inside, the air smelled of laundry detergent and yesterday's toast. Matteo waited while I lifted the mattress and reached for the envelope taped beneath the wooden bed frame. I had hidden it there the night Lily disappeared from the clinic. Elena had pressed it into my hand beside the mansion's service stairs.
“If I don't come back,” she said, “please don't let anyone make decisions for my daughter just because I'm gone.”
I thought she was frightened by postpartum exhaustion and the endless arguments she had been having with Victor about the baby's trust. I promised to keep the envelope until she returned. She never did.
I peeled off the tape. The paper was still sealed with a small blue sticker, a bird stamped in silver. I handed it to Matteo, who photographed its condition and placed it carefully in a document sleeve for Naomi. He didn't open it.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For keeping something nobody else remembered to look for.”
I almost smiled. Then I saw the framed photograph of Elsie beside my bed, and fear came back.
“Do they know about her?”
Matteo met my eyes. “Whoever sent those messages certainly does.”
We left without turning on the lights.
At a meeting in Naomi's small law office later that afternoon, I finally saw the death certificate. The document recorded the infant Lily Valenti as deceased in a motor-vehicle fire. Its medical certification bore the electronic signature of Dr. Celia Renner, a hospital physician I'd never met.
Naomi studied the time stamps.
“The certification was entered forty-six minutes before the infant's transfer to Ruth's clinic,” she said.
Gabriel stood by the window. “Could that be a mistake?”
“Possibly. But if Ruth's records are genuine, the certificate wasn't just mistaken. It was contradicted by a living patient under the same name.”
Gabriel turned toward me. “You saw her that night.”
“Yes.”
“Ruth has contemporaneous treatment notes?”
“Yes.”
Naomi nodded. “Good. We need to preserve all originals, confirm Lily's identity independently, and obtain the complete incident file through proper channels.”
I liked Naomi. She spoke to Gabriel as though he was another worried parent, not a man whose name made prosecutors nervous. She explained that having a biological father did not entitle him to walk into a home and take an infant without documenting custody and the safety of the child. Gabriel didn't argue. He asked what Lily needed.
That answer mattered.
Naomi arranged a pediatric appointment at a neutral clinic. She also contacted a family-law attorney experienced with emergency custody applications. Matteo increased security around Ruth's house, using licensed guards rather than the armed men who usually surrounded Gabriel. I watched Elsie draw flowers on the office notepad while lawyers made calls, and I wondered when ordinary life had become a thing we needed a legal plan to recover.
Two days later Dr. Renner agreed to meet investigators. She insisted her credentials had been used without permission. According to her, a hospital administrator asked her to review casualty records, but she never examined Lily and never certified an infant death. She provided a shift log showing she'd been working in another facility at the relevant time.
Gabriel believed she was lying. I wasn't sure. People can be frightened and truthful at the same time. I had become an expert in how those feelings coexist.
An investigator called Naomi while we sat around her conference table. Security footage showed someone entering a records office late on the night of the crash. The person's face was obscured by a cap, but the access card belonged to a clerk employed by a private medical-records contractor.
The contractor's name made Gabriel stand.
“DeLuca Holdings.”
Victor's company.
Naomi closed her eyes briefly. “We're going to need an independent forensic review.”
Before she could say more, a woman entered the office carrying two thick folders. She was Naomi's associate, Keisha, and she looked frightened.
“Somebody served this downstairs.”
It was a legal notice seeking to suspend Gabriel's control of several family-trust assets pending a competency review. Victor alleged Gabriel had become unstable after the loss of Elena and Lily. Attached were photographs from the cemetery showing Gabriel speaking with me and Elsie.
“Eight months of grief,” Victor wrote, “have made him vulnerable to false claims concerning his deceased daughter.”
Gabriel read the page without moving.
Then he looked at me.
“He's already trying to make you a liar.”
My stomach dropped. “What happens if the court believes him?”
Naomi replied before Gabriel could.
“Then he gains temporary authority over a very large portion of the legitimate Valenti estate. But that's not going to happen because we have a child who needs protection and evidence we can authenticate.”
I wanted to believe her. The courthouse seemed an awfully fragile shield against Victor.
That night, Matteo sent me the photograph he'd taken of Elena's unopened envelope. The silver bird on the seal caught the office light. I enlarged the image and noticed a faint pencil mark I'd never seen before.
Three numbers.
Four. One. Seven.
The same numbers Elena used on the lock of the blue cabinet in Lily's nursery.
May you like
And I remembered something I hadn't thought about since the funeral: the nursery had been locked the day Elena died, and Victor had personally ordered the room cleared before Gabriel returned home.
There might still be something left that he hadn't found.
