Chapter 5
Vanessa requested a meeting.
Cesare agreed only with attorneys present.
She arrived without the padded belly.
For the first time in months, she looked physically ordinary.
Emotionally, she was falling apart.
“I did lose a pregnancy.”
Cesare watched her.
“When?”
“Last year.”
Long before Julian.
Vanessa admitted that the current pregnancy had never existed.
She had invented it after a serious argument with Julian.
“He was pulling away.”
“Why?”
“Because of Avice.”
Cesare’s expression changed.
Vanessa corrected herself quickly.
“Not because he didn’t love her. Because he kept saying she wasn’t ready for him to remarry.”
“So you invented a child.”
“I thought it would make him choose a future.”
Cesare looked at her for a long time.
“Who knew first?”
Vanessa hesitated.
“Ethan.”
“When?”
“The beginning.”
Of course.
Ethan paid for the prosthetics.
He helped arrange private appointments that never happened.
He provided explanations when Julian questioned why he could not attend scans.
Cesare asked:
“Did Julian ever discover the truth?”
Vanessa looked down.
“I don’t know.”
That was the first answer Cesare knew was false.
“You lived with him.”
“Not full-time.”
“Did he touch your stomach?”
Vanessa’s face flushed.
“We avoided intimacy.”
“For seventeen weeks?”
Tears formed in her eyes.
“It became complicated.”
Cesare did not rescue her from the silence.
Finally Vanessa said:
“Ask Julian why he stopped asking to come to appointments.”
That sentence changed the meeting.
Cesare leaned forward.
“Why?”
Vanessa shook her head.
“I’m not saying anything else.”
Her attorney ended the interview.
As she stood, Cesare asked one last question.
“Why did you threaten Avice?”
Vanessa’s expression hardened.
“She kept watching me.”
“She’s four.”
“She kept noticing things.”
There it was.
May you like
Avice had not become Vanessa’s enemy because she was Julian’s daughter.
She became dangerous because children notice what adults train themselves not to see.
