The final weeks of Elena's pregnancy passed in a strange, suspended kind of calm. The danger of the last year was finally, fully behind them. The nursery was at last complete, with soft yellow walls and a hand carved crib that Dante had commissioned from an old craftsman his grandmother had once favored.
Enzo arrived one afternoon with news that finally closed the small, lingering thread from the family dinner weeks earlier.
"Vittorio's finances are clean," he reported, settling into the study with the same methodical calm he brought to everything. "Disappointing, in a sense. I'd half expected to find something. But it seems his resentment was born of genuine ambition rather than actual corruption. He's simply a man who believes he deserved a position he was never going to get."
"That's
