Chapter 2
The first sealed box contained letters.
Roman recognized his own handwriting.
Birthday cards.
Notes.
A photograph of Sophie’s first crib he had commissioned and never got to show her.
A small silver bracelet engraved with her initials.
He remembered sending all of it.
He had been told Nora returned everything.
The box proved otherwise.
Lauren opened the second.
Nora gasped.
Those letters were hers.
Addressed to Roman.
Some handwritten.
Some typed.
One envelope had a money order inside.
Another contained a photograph of Sophie at nine months old.
Roman picked it up with both hands.
Sophie was sitting inside a laundry basket, laughing.
He had never seen it.
Nora stared at him.
“I sent that after Helena said you died.”
“To me?”
“I didn’t know where else to send it.”
Roman looked at the envelope.
It had never left the club.
The vault was not simply storing money.
It was storing a relationship.
Every attempt from either direction had been intercepted.
Roman opened another letter.
Nora’s handwriting.
I know you’re gone, but I don’t know what to do with all the things I still need to tell you.
He stopped reading.
Lauren quietly took the page.
“Not tonight.”
Roman let her.
Then Nora asked the question that had been growing more painful by the minute.
“Why didn’t you come looking for us?”
Roman looked at her.
“I did.”
Her expression changed.
“For how long?”
“Almost a year.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere I was told to look.”
Roman explained.
Two months after Nora supposedly sent the no-contact letter, he hired a family-law investigator.
The investigator found a forwarding address in Indiana.
Then another in Ohio.
Both dead ends.
A lawyer representing “Nora Bennett” later sent Roman a cease-contact demand stating that Nora believed association with him endangered Sophie.
Roman backed off after that.
Not because he stopped caring.
Because the letter threatened court action and specifically said continued contact could harm Sophie’s stability.
Nora stared at him.
“I never had a lawyer.”
Lauren leaned forward.
“Do you have the letter?”
“Yes.”
“Original?”
“In my estate files.”
“Good.”
Nora shook her head.
“You believed it?”
Roman did not defend himself.
“I believed you had a right to choose distance.”
“You never called?”
“Your number was disconnected.”
“My number changed after Helena told me you were dead.”
“I sent people.”
“To fake addresses.”
“Yes.”
Nora looked away.
The silence hurt more because both explanations made sense separately.
Together, they revealed how precisely someone had built the wall.
Lauren ordered Roman’s old investigative file retrieved.
By morning they had it.
The forwarding addresses had all come through documentation supplied by the D’Angelo family office.
The cease-contact letter had been notarized.
By a notary regularly used by Marco.
Roman stared at the signature page.
“You’re telling me my own office gave the investigator the trail.”
Lauren nodded.
“And your own office produced the document that convinced you to stop following it.”
Roman looked toward the vault.
The same people controlled the support.
The correspondence.
The address information.
The legal paperwork.
For three years Roman had believed he was respecting Nora’s decision.
May you like
Nora had believed she was mourning him.
Somebody had given each of them exactly enough proof to stop asking the other person.
