Page 3 of Worth the Risk

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WITH THE PHOTO TUCKEDinto her back pocket and the key biting into her palm, she searched the house. She looked in every room and storage closet. If they were locked, she tried the key, without success. Near dawn, and dead on her feet, Isabella was ready to give up.

She slogged up the stairs on her way to her room, feeling like it was ten flights instead of one. At the top landing, instead of turning left, something compelled her to go right.

Outside her father’s room, she hesitated. As a child, it was off-limits, and that hadn’t changed in twenty-seven years. But her curiosity overruled good judgment.

After glancing up and down the corridor to make sure no one saw her, she turned the knob and went in. The room was immaculate and so austere it could have been a hotel room. There were no homey touches, no throw pillows on the bed, no knickknacks or photographs, not a single one of her and her mother. If what she suspected about her relationship to Lorenzo Giordano turned out to be true, that at least made sense.

When she found only a safe but nothing requiring a key in the bedroom, she turned to the closet. It was huge, with racks and racks of dark suits, floor-to-ceiling cubbies for dozens of pairs of imported Italian shoes, and a column of shelves filled with nothing but designer cologne. Toward the back was a double rack of dress shirts, all pressed and hanging without a single wrinkle, but something was off about it.

She approached. It didn’t sit flush against the wall. Bending at the waist, Isabella separated the shirts in the center of the rack and peered between them.

“Bingo,” she whispered.

Pressing her palms together, she plunged them deep into the bottom row of at least fifty shirts, and, with a clatter of hangers, opened her arms, pushing them aside. Then she dropped to her knees in front of her mother’s hand-me-down trunk and fit the key into the brass latch, which fell open when she turned it.

With trembling fingers, she curled her hands around the lid to raise it. At the last second, she hesitated. What if the contents disclosed something worse than not being who she thought she was? Already, her life was in shambles. But Lorenzo didn’t know of her suspicions, and she didn’t have to tell him. She could go on living her life as it was. Except it wasn’t Isabella Giordano’s life. If what she suspected was true, it was Isabella Pietro’s. And she would be a coward if she said nothing and went on living a lie.

Taking a deep breath, she pushed up the lid. Inside wasn’t another shocking revelation about her, but it was almost as stunning. Stacked neatly and bound with paper bands marked $100 was more cash than she’d ever seen anywhere, except a bank vault. There had to be tens of thousands. No, hundreds of thousands of dollars—a literal fortune.

It contained nothing else, except a brown letter-sized envelope. Expecting securities or something similar, she withdrew a stack of papers. But they weren’t financial documents. They were letters in the same flowing script as on the back of the photograph.

She slid out the one on top then gasped at the salutation—Marcus, my love.

Isabella sifted through the others. They were all the same, about twenty of them, starting out the same way. At the bottom of the pile, she found a white envelope. Almost dreading this next revelation, she opened the flap. Inside was a tuft of jet-black hair tied with a pink ribbon—baby hair her mother had kept for nearly three decades.

Isabella also found proof of the truth she’d been looking for. Embossed with the seal of the State of New Jersey was her birth certificate. But it wasn’t the same as the one she’d seen countless times before. It was unsigned except by her mother, and the name listed under “birth father” was Marcus Pietro, not Lorenzo Giordano.

Not knowing how she felt, she sat there somewhat dazed. Yes, she was confused. Lost and even more alone, absolutely. And saddened because, even though he hadn’t loved her as she wanted, Lorenzo had always provided for her, and, in her mind, been her dad.

With her legs stiff from sitting on the hardwood floor, she folded proof of who she was and slid it into her back pocket with the photograph. Then, on impulse, she picked up two piles of cash. He wouldn’t miss them, and she could use it because she didn’t plan to stay in her stepfather’s house longer than she had to.

A noise in the outer room sent her into a panic. She tried frantically to set things to rights, but Lorenzo walked in. His eyes shifted from her to the trunk with the lid closed but the latch still hanging open.

He sighed; his downward-tipped mouth, not a frown exactly, seemed...regretful.

“I always knew this day would come.”

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