Chapter 12 - My Husband Asked Me to Forgive HimThe next morning, I found Michael sitting beside a hospital window.
He was wearing a borrowed sweater, and his face looked older than I remembered.
For four years, I had imagined what I would say when I finally saw him again.
I had rehearsed the accusations in my head.
I had imagined slapping him, walking away, or demanding that he explain every unanswered birthday.
Instead, I stood in the doorway and said nothing.
Michael looked up.
“Claire.”
I crossed the room and sat across from him.
“Don't tell me you missed us.”
He swallowed.
“All right.”
“Don't tell me you were thinking about us every day.”
“All right.”
“And don't ask me to forgive you.”
He lowered his eyes.
“I wasn't going to.”
The quiet answer unsettled me more than an argument would have.
I folded my hands in my lap.
“I need to know everything. Not the version you told Dominic. Not the version that makes you look like a hero who sacrificed himself for his family.”
Michael nodded.
“You deserve the truth.”
He explained how he had discovered Carlo's fraudulent accounts and the illegal payments hidden inside the shipping network.
He had gathered copies of the records and planned to give them to Dominic.
Carlo's men caught him before he could.
They took him to Hawthorne Farmhouse, destroyed his phone, and told him Claire and Rosie would be killed if he tried to contact them.
He attempted to escape twice.
The second time, Carlo showed him photographs of our apartment, our workplace, and Rosie waiting outside her school.
Michael said he stopped trying after that.
I listened without interrupting.
When he finished, I stared at the floor.
“Why didn't you leave a letter somewhere?”
“I did.”
He reached for a folder on the bedside table.
Inside were several letters addressed to me and Rosie.
Some were dated four years earlier.
Others were written in the last few months.
None had been mailed.
“I kept writing them,” he whispered. “I thought maybe one day I'd find a way to send them.”
I lifted one.
It was addressed to Rosie on her fifth birthday.
My hands began to shake.
“You could have written her a hundred letters. She still needed her father.”
“I know.”
“She needed someone to teach her how to ride a bicycle. Someone to hold her hand on the first day of school. Someone to tell her that a pair of shoes wasn't too much to wish for.”
Michael covered his mouth.
“I know.”
I stood.
“Stop saying that.”
He looked up at me, tears running down his face.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to bring back four years.”
He had no answer.
Neither did I.
After a long silence, Michael spoke again.
“I won't ask you to take me back. I won't ask you to forgive me. I only want a chance to be there for Rosie, if you'll allow it.”
I thought of my daughter drawing those red shoes on an old bus ticket.
I thought of her waiting beside the window every time a car slowed outside our building.
And I thought of all the nights I'd told her that her father might come home someday.
“You will have a chance,” I said.
Michael looked up, hope flickering across his face.
“But you don't get to decide what happens next. Rosie does. And so do I.”
He nodded.
“I understand.”
I walked toward the door.
“Claire?”
I stopped.
“There's something else you need to know.”
I turned.
Michael's expression had become serious.
“Before Carlo was arrested, I found another entry in the original ledger. It concerned an account that wasn't part of his network.”
“Whose account?”
He hesitated.
“Dominic's.”
I stared at him.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone inside the Moretti organization has been moving money without Carlo's knowledge. Someone with access to Dominic's personal accounts.”
I thought of the strange man with the umbrella.
“Who?”
Michael shook his head.
“I don't know. But I believe that person is the one who sent the threat.”
He reached beneath the folder and removed a small photograph.
It showed Dominic standing beside another man at a private event.
The man's face had been circled in red.
My stomach tightened.
It was Victor Hale.
Dominic's longtime bodyguard.
The same man who had signed the false report declaring Michael dead.
Michael looked at me.
“Carlo may have been the villain we could see.”
May you like
He tapped the photograph.
“But Victor is the man we never suspected.”
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