Too Late, Don Russo: His Pregnant Wife Signed First novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Last Meeting

Don's POV

Valeria's lawyer had picked a glass conference room in Portland, fourteen floors up.

I took the meeting alone because Betsy asked me to.

"Go and ask her what she wants," she had said on the pier. "Then decide with your own head."

I walked in at ten minutes to noon.

Valeria sat at the far end of the table in a black dress, no jewelry, no red.

Her lawyer, a nervous man in a gray suit, hovered at her elbow.

"Thank you for coming, Mr. Russo," he said. "My client wishes to make a statement."

"I'm not here for a statement."

"Don," Valeria said.

Her voice was small and hoarse, and it was the voice I had spent ten years being soft for.

"Sit down. Please."

I stayed on my feet.

"You said it was about the baby."

"It is." She folded her hands. "I'll sign a retraction. About the reporter, the pregnancy lie, all of it. I'll say Marco forced me. I'll give your lawyers every message I have."

"In exchange for what?"

"You drop the complaint about the divorce filing."

"That's up to the prosecutor."

"It's up to you," she said. "You know it is. A word from Don Russo, and a fraud charge becomes a misunderstanding."

I looked at the woman I had once planned to marry.

I looked for the girl who had cried in my arms in my mother's kitchen when we were twenty-three.

She wasn't there.

There was only someone leaning forward very slightly, reading my face for the price.

"Marco forced you," I said.

"Yes."

"The tablet says otherwise."

"Marco wrote half of those messages."

"The records say otherwise too."

Her jaw tightened.

"Then I'll tell you the truth," she said, and the small voice dropped away. "Betsy will leave you. She'll take the baby and go back to that dead little town, and you'll be the man who drove up on Sundays. She won't forgive you. You're a Russo. You never give anyone anything until it's too late."

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