He Let Me Grieve a Lie, Now He Begs Forgiveness novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: Balance Due
Elio drove to the villa with both hands locked on the wheel.
He could not stop counting what he had done.
The cameras. The signatures.
The visiting days he had sat outside her clinic door and never gone in.
He parked by the garage and went up the steps without knocking.
His father-in-law was in the study with a drink, gray in the lamplight, and Luca was at the window with his arms crossed.
His mother-in-law sat on the sofa with a tissue wadded in her fist.
She looked up and said, "Is she all right?"
"She's alive and she's eating," Elio said. "She doesn't know any of you."
His mother-in-law began to cry again.
His father-in-law set down the glass.
"Luca says you gave away your shares."
"I gave them to your daughter."
"You gave a stranger forty percent of my company."
"She is not a stranger. She is the one person in this house who never lied to anybody."
Luca turned from the window.
"She's the reason we've been hiding for three years."
"Is she?" Elio said. "Show me one thing. Show me one piece of proof that she touched Gemma. Not what the woman said. Not what Gemma said. A video, a witness, a doctor's report."
Luca opened his mouth.
He closed it.
His father-in-law said nothing for a long moment.
Then he opened a drawer and took out a thin blue folder and dropped it on the desk.
"Read."
Elio read.
It was a petition, forty pages, typed, with a lawyer's letterhead.
It asked a judge to declare Chiara Pellegrino Marcato legally unable to manage her own affairs.
It named him as the petitioner, with his signature already on the last page.
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