Chapter 2 - WHAT RETINITIS PIGMENTOSA DOES NOT MEAN
Alina’s new attorney was named Vivian Cho.
The irony of another Vivien/Vivian? Maybe too similar. Let's choose Naomi Feld.
Naomi Feld was sixty, sharp, and entirely unimpressed by me.
Lucia had found her through a university friend.
Family law.
High-net-worth marital agreements.
No Moretti work.
Perfect.
Naomi’s first act was to take the divorce papers out of Alina’s hands.
“Not because you cannot read them,” she said. “Because you should not read settlement documents your husband drafted while emotionally distressed without counsel.”
I liked her immediately.
She did not care.
My attorney Seth Kaplan joined by video.
I watched his face when Naomi showed him the PDF.
He went pale.
“I did not write that.”
Good.
Not enough.
“Can you prove?” Naomi asked.
Seth looked offended.
Then professional.
“I can provide my mailbox archives, document management logs, drafting metadata, and writing samples through forensic counsel.”
“Not directly to Mr. Moretti.”
“Agreed.”
Good.
Independent firm:
Northlake Digital Forensics.
Retained jointly for narrow question:
authenticate PDF and trace source if possible.
Costs split equally from marital household account? That could contaminate. Alina had her own money but maybe less. Naomi arranged cost-sharing through written stipulation that Dante paying half created no control. Better.
Original device imaged with Alina’s consent.
Rafael not notified yet because preservation orders first.
Moretti Global audit committee chair—independent director Evelyn March—was informed through counsel because CFO might be implicated in misuse of company systems.
No dramatic private investigation.
No Rocco equivalent.
Process.
Then medical conversation.
Alina invited me to one appointment.
Not all.
One.
Dr. Nisha Patel’s office had white walls and terrible abstract art.
Alina sat beside me.
Not holding my hand.
I wanted to.
Did not assume.
Dr. Patel looked at both of us.
“Before we start, Alina, what do you want Dante to hear?”
Good.
Alina answered:
“Everything we know. Not everything we fear.”
There.
Dr. Patel nodded.
She explained retinitis pigmentosa was a group of inherited retinal disorders affecting photoreceptor cells.
Alina’s genetic testing had identified a pathogenic variant consistent with her clinical findings.
Her current symptoms:
night blindness,
reduced peripheral field,
difficulty adapting from bright to dark,
occasional trouble with low-contrast environments.
Central visual acuity remained good.
Reading remained good with ordinary correction and lighting.
No one could give exact timeline.
Some people retain useful central vision for decades.
Some decline faster.
Treatments depend on gene and subtype; research ongoing.
Low-vision rehabilitation and accessibility planning can preserve independence regardless of progression.
I asked:
“Will she become completely blind?”
Dr. Patel looked at Alina first.
She nodded permission.
“We cannot responsibly predict complete blindness. That word also obscures the range of visual function. Her field loss may progress. Central acuity may remain functional for a long time. We monitor.”
I realized how much harm my first question could do.
Alina stared at floor.
I said:
“Sorry.”
She glanced.
“Better here than after you’ve built a panic room.”
Fair.
Dr. Patel continued.
No reason Alina could not travel.
Work.
Exercise.
Drive?
That was more complicated.
Current field tests still met legal requirements? Let's be careful. She had voluntarily stopped driving at night. Day driving under periodic evaluation. Dr. Patel said she should avoid night driving and follow state requirements/occupational driving assessment as fields change.
Good.
No immediate helplessness.
No “lifetime care” assumption.
I looked at the fake email phrase.
Progressive visual diagnosis.
Lifetime care.
Whoever wrote it had turned uncertainty into dependency.
After appointment, Alina and I sat in the car.
Not moving.
“You knew seven months.”
“Yes.”
“Who else?”
“Mom. Dr. Patel. Genetic counselor. My primary doctor.”
“Rafael?”
“I never told him.”
“Then how did he know?”
She looked.
“I submitted one reimbursement through family office for genetic testing before I realized it listed the clinic name.”
There.
Our family office offered executive-spouse healthcare reimbursement for out-of-network costs.
Privacy disaster waiting.
“Who processes?”
“Benefits administrator.”
“Rafael has access?”
“He shouldn’t.”
I called no one.
Not yet.
I said:
“That program changes.”
Alina looked.
“Because of me?”
“Because a CFO should not be able to infer a spouse’s diagnosis from reimbursement records.”
“Can he?”
“We don’t know.”
Good.
Then she said:
“You’re doing it.”
“What?”
“Fixing system because you’re scared.”
I looked.
“Is that bad?”
“Not automatically. But I need one day where my diagnosis is not a governance emergency.”
Fair.
I put phone down.
“What do you want to do?”
“Lunch.”
I almost laughed.
“Lunch.”
We went to a café she liked.
I had never been.
Three years married.
Did not know.
She ordered grilled cheese.
I stared.
“What?”
“You hate cheese.”
“No. You hate melted cheese.”
I laughed.
“Have we met?”
“Barely.”
There.
Painful.
True.
Then she asked:
“Why did you think I did not love you?”
We spent lunch doing something more frightening than board litigation.
Specific memories.
The January night.
Her hand going still because she had seen flashes? Actually RP doesn't cause pain. She had just gotten field test. Fear.
The east dressing room because she started waking early to navigate in darkness? Better: she moved clothes to room with brighter morning light after bumping into furniture twice, but didn't explain. Dante interpreted distancing.
The dinners she skipped because clinic appointments and mother talks.
The social events she avoided because dim ballrooms became difficult.
I thought she was withdrawing from public life as my wife.
She was avoiding low-light spaces she had not yet learned to navigate confidently.
Then my distance confirmed her belief that I knew and pitied.
A perfect machine made of silence.
“Why did you never ask if I loved you?” she asked.
“Because I was afraid of the answer.”
She laughed.
“You own half of Michigan Avenue.”
“Not half.”
“Dante.”
“Fine.”
“And you were afraid to ask your wife a sentence.”
“Yes.”
She shook head.
Then:
“Do not become nicer to me because I have RP.”
I looked.
“I was already trying to become nicer because I realized I’m an idiot.”
“That’s acceptable.”
Good.
Then the forensic report came four days later.
The PDF was fabricated.
Not merely edited.
Created from a Moretti Global legal memo template.
Author metadata scrubbed.
But embedded font package and PDF producer matched software build used on an executive finance workstation image.
One device.
Rafael Moretti’s assigned laptop.
Not proof he personally created.
Could be someone with access.
Then email routing.
The PDF had never passed through Seth Kaplan’s mailbox.
No message ID.
No server trace.
No DMS record.
Fake.
Alina read report twice.
Then cried.
Not relief.
Rage.
“He made me think you knew.”
“Yes.”
“He told me to pull away.”
“Yes.”
“He watched us.”
“Yes.”
Then:
“Why?”
The next report answered partly.
Family office reimbursement log.
Rafael’s credentials accessed Alina’s benefits file three times in February.
No legitimate CFO function.
He viewed:
provider name,
date,
amount,
procedure category code.
Not diagnosis.
Clinic name was “Midwest Retina & Genetics Center.”
Enough to infer.
He then searched public websites from corporate browser for:
retinitis pigmentosa spouse support
progressive retinal disease prognosis
blindness divorce financial planning
My hands shook.
There.
Not compassion.
Research for manipulation.
Audit committee suspended Rafael immediately.
System access revoked by independent IT.
He was notified through counsel.
I did not call him.
That surprised everyone.
Especially me.
Then one more artifact.
A deleted draft recovered from his laptop.
Not the fake email.
A note.
If A leaves before Q4, governance committee reopens succession. D will not remarry quickly. Board confidence shifts.
Succession.
There.
Moretti Global had no formal requirement that I be married.
But the board had long worried about key-person risk, family succession, and my refusal to build a broader executive bench.
Our marriage had calmed activist investors who believed I was becoming less volatile.
If I divorced publicly before the annual governance review, Rafael—CFO and family—could argue for expanded authority or co-chair role.
Not enough.
A motive.
Then another line:
Bellandi restructuring easier without spousal conflict.
Alina’s family company.
There.
“What restructuring?” she asked.
I did not know.
That frightened me more.
Because Moretti Global had financed Bellandi Precision three years earlier.
Rafael managed much of the refinancing.
And if he had been willing to manipulate my marriage for governance leverage, I wanted to know what else sat beneath the deal that created the marriage in the first place.
Before we left Dr. Patel’s office, Alina asked one more question.
“Do I need to tell my employer now?”
Dr. Patel shook her head.
“That is an employment-law question more than a medical one. Medically, you disclose what is necessary for accommodations and safety. You do not owe coworkers your diagnosis simply because they may notice changes.”
That mattered.
Alina had been treating disclosure like a confession.
It was not.
At home, she opened the notes app on her phone and made three lists.
Need to tell.
Might tell.
Do not owe.
I watched from across the room.
“Where am I?”
She looked.
“Complicated.”
Fair.
Then she added me under Need to tell and turned the screen.
“Congratulations.”
I laughed.
It should not have felt like a gift.
It did.
That evening we also reviewed the family-office reimbursement process with Naomi present.
Not to investigate diagnosis.
To establish what information had been exposed.
The reimbursement form had asked for:
provider,
service category,
date,
amount,
proof of payment.
Too much.
Alina had assumed because it was a “family office” the information was private from executives.
The written policy said it was restricted.
The system permissions did not enforce that restriction adequately.
There.
A promise and an architecture disagreeing.
Naomi said:
“Privacy is not a sentence in a policy. It is who can actually click.”
I wrote that down.
Alina saw.
“Do not turn my medical file into a management quote.”
“Too late.”
She smiled despite herself.
Then the most uncomfortable part:
I asked whether she wanted to stop using the reimbursement benefit entirely.
She said:
“No.”
I blinked.
“Why not?”
“Because the benefit is part of compensation. I should not have to give it up because your controls were bad.”
There.
Of course.
The answer was not:
Alina withdraws.
The answer was:
system improves.
The next reimbursement went through the new external administrator pilot.
No provider name visible to Moretti finance.
Aggregate category only.
Alina forwarded me the confirmation.
Subject:
LOOK, GOVERNANCE.
I replied:
VERY ROMANTIC.
She wrote:
May you like
THIS IS YOUR LOVE LANGUAGE NOW.
Maybe.
