Chapter 8 - THE WEIGHT OF FOUR WORDS
The formal divorce petition arrived at the corporate offices of Moretti Enterprises at 11:15 AM on Friday via certified courier.
Vincent was not in his office. He was sitting in the back of his town car outside a modest, three-story brick apartment building in Brooklyn—the home of Claire’s older sister, Rachel.
He had been there for six hours.
The car door opened, and Henry, his longtime driver, looked into the rear compartment with hesitant sympathy. "Mr. Moretti. The sister came down to walk the dog. She saw the car."
Vincent was out of the vehicle before Henry could finish the sentence. He crossed the damp sidewalk in long strides, intercepting Rachel Bennett as she reached the curb with her golden retriever.
Rachel was thirty-five, an elementary school art teacher who had never hidden her disdain for Vincent's corporate lifestyle. When she saw him approaching, her expression hardened into a glare of pure, unadulterated venom.
"Where is she, Rachel?" Vincent demanded, his voice hoarse, his face haggard with thirty-six hours of sleeplessness.
"Get away from me, Vincent," Rachel said, pulling the dog’s leash short.
"Rachel, listen to me," Vincent pleaded, reaching out with an open hand—a gesture of raw, unpolished desperation that would have stunned anyone who had ever sat across from him in a boardroom. "You don't understand what happened. Vanessa lied to me. The hospital records were withheld—I didn't know about the baby. I swear to God on my life, Rachel, I didn't know about the child."
Rachel stopped. She looked at him with an expression that was far worse than anger. It was pity.
"Do you really think this is just about the baby, Vincent?" she asked quietly.
Vincent blinked, thrown off balance by the question. "What?"
"You think Claire left you because of an administrative misunderstanding about a pregnancy?" Rachel gave a short, bitter laugh that sounded like dry twigs snapping. "You arrogant, blind idiot."
"I am trying to fix it!" Vincent shouted, his composure shattering on the quiet Brooklyn street. "I fired Vanessa! I have four private investigative firms searching every hotel from Boston to Washington! I have the best obstetricians and trauma specialists in the country on retainer! If she needs time, she can have it—if she wants me to step down as CEO, I will step down! But she has to come home!"
"She doesn't have a home with you, Vincent," Rachel said, her voice dropping into a register of icy, devastating certainty. "She was an appointment on your calendar. You gave her fifteen minutes between eight o'clock and eight-fifteen, while you gave forty hours a week to an assistant who treated your wife like an unwanted solicitor."
"I loved her," Vincent choked out, the words feeling foreign, thick, and useless on his tongue.
"No," Rachel said, stepping past him toward the entrance of her building. "You loved having a wife who stayed neatly inside the box you assigned to her. And on Tuesday, when she was bleeding to death and asked you for five minutes of your life outside that box, you told her she was being difficult."
Rachel turned at the door, looking back at the man who commanded billions in capital.
"She doesn't hate you, Vincent. That’s the part you won't survive. She doesn't hate you at all. She just realized you aren't worth the fifteen minutes."
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The heavy glass door clicked shut, leaving Vincent standing alone on the sidewalk while the cold Atlantic drizzle soaked through the shoulders of his bespoke coat.
***
