Chapter 7 - A WIFE'S TESTIMONY
Victoria Moretti entered the courthouse through a side door beneath a gray November sky. She wore a plain navy coat instead of her familiar designer clothes, but Emma recognized the way she held her chin, as though every room were a test of who would look away first. Her attorney walked on one side, a victim advocate on the other. Victoria had reported threats after the abandoned-car incident, and the court had arranged a protected interview about the financial investigation.
Emma watched from a different corridor. She had come with her own attorney, Jasmine Park, to discuss the pending assault charge and a possible protective order. The arrangements were separate. She did not want the prosecution to argue that Victoria's alleged financial misconduct somehow made the attack on Emma more serious. The bruises and the witnesses were enough to establish what happened to her, and Emma wanted the court to see that clearly.
"You don't have to watch her arrive," Jasmine said.
"I know. I wanted to see whether I'd freeze."
"And?"
Emma considered the question. Her hands were cold, and her mouth was dry, but her feet had not moved toward the exit. "I'm afraid," she said. "I'm also here."
Jasmine smiled. "Those things can be true together."
The interview did not begin with a confession. It began with the careful reading of a letter Victoria had given her attorney. She acknowledged transferring documents to Peter Vale and meeting with Alexander Romano, but insisted she believed the foundation funds were being moved to shield them from a tax investigation. The claim was dubious. She had signed correspondence about patient benefit accounts, and several messages referred to amounts inconsistent with reported grants. Prosecutors asked whether she had reviewed those discrepancies. She said she had trusted the foundation's financial managers.
Dante was not present. His attorney had advised him that an interview involving his estranged wife and his own oversight should proceed without him. Emma had expected him to resist. Instead, he sent all requested documents and stayed away.
Victoria identified the person who had first approached her about the restructuring: Gabriel Moretti, Dante's cousin and a longtime legal adviser to the foundation. Gabriel had managed property donations and helped establish Harborlight Administration. He was also the man who had encouraged Dante to appoint Peter Vale to a new auditing role years earlier, despite the apparently inconsistent history of Vale's employment.
"Why didn't you tell your husband?" prosecutor Cole asked.
"Because Gabriel said Dante knew about it," Victoria replied. "He showed me a memorandum with Dante's signature."
"Was it genuine?"
"I assumed so."
"Did you ask him?"
"No."
Cole let the answer rest. Emma recognized that silence. It was the space in which a person might finally hear the weakness of their own explanation.
Victoria continued. Gabriel had said the foundation faced a confidential regulatory inquiry. He claimed moving funds temporarily to Harborlight would protect patient care. When Victoria began asking questions about missing receipts, Peter Vale threatened to release evidence that she had personally authorized fraudulent expenditures. She had panicked and tried to recover the papers from the Moretti mansion.
"Is that why you assaulted Emma Collins?" Cole asked.
Victoria's hands tightened around her cup. "She was in my office. I thought she was stealing."
"You have been told multiple employees saw you strike her repeatedly."
"I lost my temper."
"Did you tell her to remain on her knees and declare herself worthless?"
Victoria looked away. "I said things I regret."
"Did you threaten her after being removed from the house?"
"I was angry."
Emma read the summarized interview transcript later with Jasmine. Victoria's words were thin. They described her mood as though fear or anger could explain away the choice to hurt someone with less power. Emma did not feel better knowing that Victoria had been frightened by Peter Vale. It made the situation more complicated, not less harmful.
Jasmine explained that Victoria's financial cooperation might influence negotiations in that case, but would not automatically erase the separate assault charges. Emma nodded. She did not want revenge disguised as justice. She wanted the facts established and a boundary she could rely on.
"Would you be willing to testify if it goes to trial?" Jasmine asked.
Emma looked at the bruises that had mostly faded from her face. "Yes. But I'd like support. And I'd like the others to have that choice too."
That afternoon, Shah called with records linking Gabriel Moretti to Harborlight. A consulting contract gave his private firm broad authority to authorize transfers without a second trustee's signature, an arrangement several experts described as highly unusual for a charity managing patient funds. Emails showed he had argued against independent oversight on the grounds that confidentiality was essential to protecting beneficiaries.
"He used patients as the reason nobody could inspect the records," Emma said.
"That's one possible reading," Shah answered. "We also need to know who actually prepared the false documentation and who knowingly approved it."
Evidence soon established that Gabriel's office had received reports about mismatched patient files. In an email from fourteen years earlier, a clerk warned him that Ruth Evers's funeral payment could not be reconciled with a living patient's medical record. Gabriel replied that the matter had already been resolved and ordered the inquiry closed. The clerk kept a copy outside the official system.
"What happened to the clerk?" Emma asked.
"He resigned a month later," Shah said. "His name is Oliver Dent. We are trying to contact him."
Dante was waiting at his attorney's office when Emma arrived for a separate meeting about severance and workplace protections. She had requested that the documents be signed somewhere other than the mansion. He stood when she entered, then remained where he was until she chose a chair.
"You've heard about Gabriel," he said.
"Some of it."
"He helped manage my mother's estate. I trusted him to explain the foundation's structure. He's also been my cousin since we were boys."
Emma put her bag down. "That doesn't tell me whether you knew about the money."
"No. It doesn't. The records can answer that more reliably than I can."
Dante handed her a letter from his legal team acknowledging the independent investigation, confirming her employment protections, and offering a settlement for workplace harms without requiring confidentiality about the assault or waiving her right to cooperate with authorities. Jasmine read every clause and requested changes to two. Dante agreed to let the lawyers negotiate them.
"I thought you'd tell me what to sign," Emma said when they were briefly alone.
"A month ago I might have."
"Why not now?"
"Because you're not a problem for me to solve. And because I have no right to make an agreement feel like a favor."
Emma looked toward the office window. She had spent months trying to guess what Victoria wanted her to say. She could not afford to repeat that pattern with Dante, however kindly he behaved.
"I appreciate that," she said. "But I still need time to decide."
"Take it."
Dante was scheduled to give an official interview the next morning. On the way out, Emma overheard him tell his attorney not to suppress any document merely because it embarrassed him. She wondered whether he knew how much easier that instruction sounded than it would be to follow.
Late that evening, a woman named Patricia Moretti called Emma. She was Gabriel's sister and had learned Emma's number through a mutual acquaintance at the church basement meeting. She said she wanted to give Emma information before it disappeared.
"I won't meet privately," Emma replied. "You can contact Detective Shah."
"I already did. They're sending someone. I just wanted you to know my brother is not acting alone."
"Who else?"
Patricia hesitated. "There was a recording. Francesca made it before she died. She gave it to Gabriel to deliver to Dante."
Emma sat straighter. "What happened to it?"
"Gabriel kept the original. I heard it once when we were arguing about the estate. She said she had found people making money from children who never received care."
"Did she name anyone?"
"I remember one name. Peter. But then she said something about Dante. About a decision he'd made without understanding what it meant."
Emma felt cold. "You should tell Shah all of this."
"I will. But you need to prepare yourself. The recording doesn't make Francesca's son innocent."
When the call ended, Emma sat for a long time with her hands folded around the phone. She had begun to believe Dante was trying to change. She wanted that to be true. But the case was teaching her that wanting a person to be better could not make an inconvenient fact disappear.
In the morning, the prosecutor received a digital copy of Francesca's recording from Patricia, along with an account of where it had been stored. Audio specialists began examining the file and seeking the original device.
The first verified sentence on the recording was Francesca's voice: "Dante, if you are hearing this, then Gabriel has finally decided to tell you what he persuaded you to sign."
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Emma heard those words only after the investigators confirmed they could be shared. She stood beside Jasmine in a quiet office and listened as Francesca's voice, preserved across fourteen years, opened a question nobody could answer for Dante.
What had he signed?
