Chapter 2
The next morning Isabella wanted to go home.
Massimo thought he had misheard her.
“What?”
“My clothes are there. Noah’s school things. Everything.”
“I’ll have them brought here.”
“No.”
“Isabella.”
She looked exhausted.
“I can’t disappear from my own life.”
Massimo understood the sentence.
He did not like it.
Grant had spent the night calling.
Twenty-three times.
Vanessa called nine.
Neither received an answer.
Massimo’s attorney advised him not to treat the townhouse like a prison in the opposite direction.
“If Isabella wants to leave, you cannot simply decide she stays.”
Massimo hated hearing it.
He knew the attorney was right.
So he asked his daughter:
“Do you want to go back to Grant?”
Isabella stared at her coffee.
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
That answer was more honest than anything she had said the night before.
Noah sat at the kitchen island drawing.
Massimo noticed the name at the bottom of the page.
NOAH H.
He looked at Isabella.
“Why is he writing Hale?”
Her face changed.
Noah’s legal name was Noah Lombardi.
Massimo knew because he had been at the hospital when Isabella filled out the birth certificate.
Grant had objected at the time.
They eventually agreed Noah would carry Isabella’s surname because Grant claimed his own family name carried too many business enemies.
Massimo had found that explanation strange.
He had not interfered.
Now he looked at the page.
“School makes us write Hale,” Noah said.
Massimo turned toward Isabella.
She closed her eyes.
“Grant changed what he could.”
“What does that mean?”
“School records. Event lists. Doctor files. Anything that didn’t require a formal legal name change.”
“Why?”
Isabella’s answer came quietly.
“He said Lombardi made Noah a target.”
Massimo almost accepted that.
Then Noah added:
“Dad says Grandpa’s name makes people bad.”
The room went still.
Massimo looked toward his daughter.
“Is that what you believe?”
Isabella did not answer.
That hurt more than a denial.
Then Massimo remembered his own words from the showroom.
You hid my grandson’s name.
May you like
At the time, he had meant Grant was erasing Noah’s identity.
Now he wondered whether Isabella had helped him do it.
