Chapter 20 - The Daughter They Could Never Predict
Lucia came home thirty-one days after she was born.
By then, Chicago had changed.
So had we.
Moretti Tower remained open, but three floors were occupied by federal investigators. Newspapers ran photographs of Adrian beside headlines that alternated between KINGPIN TURNS STATE WITNESS and MORETTI EMPIRE CRACKS FROM WITHIN.
He hated both.
“I did not turn state witness,” he complained one morning while assembling a bassinet in my living room.
“You provided evidence.”
“That is different.”
“You are arguing semantics while holding the instruction manual upside down.”
He looked at it.
Turned it around.
“I knew that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He glared at the bassinet as if it were a rival family.
Lucia slept against my chest, finally over five pounds, dark hair curling at the back of her head.
Her doctors called her progress remarkable.
I called it exhausting.
She ate every two hours and objected loudly to cold wipes.
Adrian learned diaper changes with the intensity he once reserved for corporate negotiations.
Marco refused to hold her for three days because he was afraid he would break her.
On the fourth day, she fell asleep on his shoulder, and he stood motionless for forty minutes.
Nora photographed it.
He threatened to resign.
Rafael recovered from his gunshot wounds and entered federal protective custody.
Elias testified under his real name for the first time in his life.
He visited Lucia once.
He stood beside her crib and cried so quietly I pretended not to notice.
“She looks like Adrian,” he said.
“She has my mouth.”
“Adrian said the same thing about you.”
“Of course he did.”
Elias smiled.
Then his expression changed.
“Mara says the mutation may not be random.”
I stiffened.
“Mara says many things.”
“I know.”
“She does not get access to Lucia.”
“I agree.”
“Not blood. Not photos. Not reports.”
“I agree.”
He hesitated.
“But you should know she found a similar sequence once.”
My stomach dropped.
“Where?”
“In a sample from 1944.”
I stared at him.
“My grandfather?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“His mother. Isabella.”
I felt the room go still.
“The woman who started all of this?”
“Maybe the woman who survived it.”
Elias handed me a sealed photocopy.
A lab note written decades ago described an unknown marker found in Isabella’s blood after the birth of Thomas Hart.
Researchers at the time had dismissed it as contamination.
Dr. Chen reviewed the note later and refused to speculate.
“Old laboratory methods were unreliable,” she said.
“So Lucia could simply have a benign new variation?”
“Yes.”
“Or something inherited from Isabella?”
“Possibly.”
“Or something Bellini engineered?”
Dr. Chen looked at me firmly.
“We have no evidence anyone genetically engineered your child.”
That sentence helped.
I repeated it to myself when fear became imaginative.
No evidence.
One month later, Lorenzo Moretti died in federal custody.
Official cause: cardiac arrest.
Adrian received the news without expression.
“Do you believe it?” I asked.
“That he died?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me.
“I watched my family bury him once.”
Fair point.
The body was independently identified by two federal laboratories before Adrian allowed himself to believe it.
Even then, he did not attend the funeral.
Neither did Rafael.
Mara did not receive immunity.
She pleaded guilty to multiple charges but continued cooperating with prosecutors. Her attorneys argued that she had ultimately helped expose Lorenzo.
I did not care.
A person can do one right thing after a hundred wrong ones without erasing the hundred.
Adrian’s legal future remained uncertain.
Federal prosecutors never charged him in connection with the medical program, but investigations into Moretti businesses continued.
He sold two companies, shut down three others, and created a restitution fund for victims named in Thomas’s archive.
“Is this guilt?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He looked offended.
“Most people would say something comforting.”
“You married the wrong woman for comfort.”
“Technically divorced.”
I gave him a look.
He smiled.
That remained unresolved too.
Us.
He moved into the guest room of my new house because Lucia needed both parents nearby and because neither of us trusted the city enough yet to live separately.
The arrangement was supposed to last two weeks.
Three months later, his shoes were still beside the front door.
We did not remarry.
We did not call ourselves together.
Sometimes he kissed me in the kitchen.
Sometimes I let him.
Once I kissed him first.
We never discussed it the next morning.
Healing, I discovered, was less cinematic than heartbreak.
It happened in bottles washed at three a.m.
In therapy appointments Adrian pretended not to dread.
In arguments where one of us finally said, “I was wrong,” before the other had to bleed for it.
In the first afternoon I left Lucia alone with him and went for coffee without checking my phone every thirty seconds.
In the first night he woke from a nightmare about Lorenzo and admitted he was afraid instead of walking outside alone.
By spring, Lucia was healthy enough that Dr. Chen reduced her follow-ups.
Her mysterious mutation had caused no obvious illness.
In fact, her blood counts were unusually strong.
That fact frightened me more than it should have.
I did not want her to be extraordinary because extraordinary had nearly gotten her stolen before she could breathe on her own.
I wanted ordinary.
Skinned knees.
Bad piano recitals.
First crushes.
Arguments about curfew.
A life no one studied.
One rainy evening, Adrian found me sitting on the nursery floor while Lucia slept.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
He sat beside me.
After a moment, I said, “Do you ever think about what would have happened if you hadn’t walked into that clinic?”
“All the time.”
“I would have had her alone.”
“You would have managed.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He looked toward the crib.
“I think Lorenzo’s people would have found you eventually.”
“So your walking in saved us?”
“Maybe.”
“Or it triggered everything.”
“Also maybe.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder.
“For once, I hate maybe.”
He kissed my hair.
My phone buzzed.
An email.
No sender name.
No subject.
Just an attachment.
I opened it.
A scanned photograph filled the screen.
Black and white.
1944.
Isabella Moretti standing beside Lake Michigan with baby Thomas in her arms.
But this photograph was wider than the one from Bellini’s archive.
Someone had been cropped out of the original.
A man stood beside Isabella.
Young.
Dark-haired.
Holding another infant.
On the back of the photograph, someone had written:
THE FIRST TWO SURVIVED.
My skin turned cold.
Adrian read over my shoulder.
“Two?”
I zoomed in.
The second infant wore a tiny bracelet.
A name was barely visible.
LUCIA.
Adrian stopped breathing.
“That’s impossible.”
Our daughter stirred in her crib.
I looked from the photograph to her sleeping face.
Then another email arrived.
This one had a subject line.
YOU FOUND THOMAS. NOW FIND HIS SISTER.
Below it was a location.
Not Chicago.
Not Wisconsin.
Sicily.
And a final sentence:
Lorenzo was never the oldest person keeping the secret.
Adrian looked at me.
I looked at him.
For months, we had believed the story began with one family in Chicago and ended with one old man in handcuffs.
Lucia opened her eyes.
Gray like Adrian’s.
Calm like mine.
Alive because so many people had tried to decide what her blood meant before she ever had the chance to decide who she would become.
I picked her up and held her against my chest.
Adrian stood beside us.
“Do we go?” he asked.
I stared at the word SICILY glowing on my screen.
Then at my daughter.
I thought of Grandpa’s warning.
Blood is only information.
The danger is what people do when they think it gives them ownership.
I smiled without humor.
“Not yet.”
Adrian raised an eyebrow.
“Not yet?”
“We just got her sleeping through four hours at a time.”
He laughed.
Then the phone buzzed a third time.
This message contained no words.
Only a live photograph of our house taken from across the street.
I went still.
Adrian’s laughter disappeared.
May you like
Outside, headlights turned off in the rain.
And somewhere beyond the nursery window, someone who knew the first Lucia was watching the second one sleep.
