“Who notarized it?”
Caroline turned the page.
Her face had already answered.
“Thomas Bell.”
Giovanni went still.
“Who is Thomas Bell?” I asked.
He did not respond immediately.
Then he looked toward Luca, asleep beneath a white blanket, and something like dread crossed his face.
“My father’s attorney,” he said. “But he died three years ago.”
Caroline placed another page on the table.
“Then someone is using a dead man’s seal.”
Before anyone could speak, Marco appeared at the door.
His face was pale.
“Giovanni.”
“What?”
“Your mother is downstairs.”
My pulse jumped.
“I said no,” Giovanni replied.
“She is not alone.”
He glanced at me, then lowered his voice.
“She brought a priest. And a woman claiming she has the legal right to examine Luca.”
Caroline stood. “Absolutely not.”
Giovanni’s face hardened. “Name.”
Marco swallowed.
“Dr. Elena Bell.”
The name struck Caroline like a physical blow.
She turned toward the forged document on the table.
“Bell,” she whispered.
I looked between them. “Who is she?”
Giovanni’s gaze moved to the glass wall of the hospital room, where beyond it an elegant woman in black stood at the far end of the corridor, perfectly still, watching us.
Beside her was a woman in a white coat holding a leather medical bag.
Giovanni spoke quietly, and for the first time since he had arrived, he sounded afraid.
“Elena Bell was the doctor who signed my birth certificate.”
Luca stirred in his sleep.
The woman in the corridor lifted her head as if she had heard his name through the glass.
Then my phone buzzed.
An unknown number.
The message contained only one photograph.
A newborn baby wrapped in a blue hospital blanket.
On the back of the photo, someone had written:
Giovanni Moretti — property of Bell custody file.
A second message arrived before I could breathe.
Like father, like son.
I looked up at Giovanni.
His face had gone white.