Chapter 4: The Name He Wouldn't Say
Dr.
Ferrante arrived at eleven minutes past midnight.
He was a small man with silver-rimmed glasses and the careful movements of someone who had spent decades delivering bad news gently.
Matteo met him in the study on the ground floor, away from the nursery.
Liana sat in the chair beside the window, Nico still against her shoulder.
She had not put him down.
"I need a DNA comparison," Matteo said.
"Fast, private, and I need the chain of custody documented from the moment you take the samples."
Ferrante set his bag on the desk.
"Comparing whom?"
"The child.
And this woman."
Ferrante looked at Liana.
Then at the sleeping baby.
He asked no further questions.
He had worked for the Varric family for eleven years.
The swabs took less than three minutes.
Nico barely stirred.
"Forty-eight hours for full results," Ferrante said.
"Thirty-six if I call in a favor."
"Call in the favor."
Ferrante nodded, packed his bag, and left.
The room was quiet.
One lamp burned on the desk.
Matteo poured two glasses of water and set one near Liana without comment.
"You said you already knew who," she said.
He sat down across from her.
"I said I had a suspicion."
"Tell me."
He was quiet for a moment.
"My brother.
Dario."
Liana waited.
"Dario is four years younger than me.
He has always believed that the Varric name, the business, the estate — all of it should have been shared equally between us.
Our father left it to me.
Dario has never accepted that." Matteo turned the water glass slowly in his hand.
"When Elena became pregnant, Dario was the first person to congratulate us.
He was at the hospital the night she delivered.
He came with flowers.
He stayed two hours."
"He had access."
"He knew the staff.
He donates to St.
Carmine's every year.
Has for a decade." Matteo set the glass down.
"A child with Varric bl00d, raised by Dario, would give him a claim.
A legal claim.
If anything happened to me, and Nico were later revealed to be his son rather than mine—"
"He would inherit."
"Everything."
Liana looked at the baby.
"But then why leave the photograph?
Why did the woman in the footage come back and hide it under the mattress?"
Matteo's jaw tightened.
"Because Elena left it."
"Elena was the woman in the footage?"
"I think so.
She was d*ad before I could ask." He stood and walked to the window.
"She must have discovered something before the accident.
Something she couldn't prove.
So she hid the photograph where only someone looking for it would find it." He paused.
"She hid it for me."
"But you didn't find it."
"I didn't know to look in the seam."
Liana thought of the woman on the security footage.
The careful way she had leaned over the crib.
The way she had touched the baby's forehead first, before placing anything beneath the mattress.
Not the gesture of someone leaving evidence.
The gesture of a mother saying goodbye.
"She knew she was in danger," Liana said.
"Yes."
"And the accident—"
"Was investigated as an accident." His voice did not change.
"I accepted that.
I had no reason not to." He turned from the window.
"I had no reason until tonight."
Liana felt the weight of what he wasn't saying.
"You think Dario arranged it."
"I think I need proof before I say that out loud to anyone else."
"You've said it to me."
"You're not anyone else." He looked at her directly.
"You're the woman who may be holding your own son.
Which means you have more reason than anyone to want the truth."
She looked down at Nico.
His breath was slow and even.
His small fist had relaxed completely.
"What does Dario know about me?" she asked.
"Nothing yet."
"Will he find out I'm here?"
"He finds out most things eventually." Matteo moved toward the door.
"Which is why we have thirty-six hours."
"And if the test confirms it?"
He stopped with his hand on the door frame.
"Then I go to war."
"Against your brother."
"Against whoever took something that belonged to us." He didn't look back.
"Both of us."
After he left, Liana sat in the lamplight with the baby on her shoulder and the photograph on the desk in front of her.
Elena's handwriting.
Four words.
*In case you forget.*
She hadn't forgotten anything.
She had tried.
She had scrubbed floors and polished silver and worked nights and tried with everything she had to forget.
And then a baby had cried across a marble foyer and her body had remembered before her mind could stop it.
She pressed her lips to the top of Nico's head.
Thirty-six hours.
She didn't sleep.
At seven the following morning, Matteo's phone rang.
He answered it in the corridor outside the study.
Liana heard his voice go flat and quiet in a way that was different from the night before.
He came back in.
He stood in the doorway.
"Dario called," he said.
"He's coming for dinner tonight.
May you like
He says he wants to check on the baby." His eyes met hers across the room.
"He's never asked to do that before."
