Chapter 8 - THE CHILD VICTOR REFUSED TO COUNTClara was discharged from the ICU after nine days and moved to a private rehabilitation floor.

The first morning she could walk twenty feet without assistance, she asked to see the nursery.

I told her we didn’t have to.

She said she did.

So I drove her home.

The room was still half finished.

Blue-grey walls.

An unopened crib box.

A stack of tiny clothes beside the dresser.

Clara stood in the doorway.

Then she slid down against the wall.

I sat beside her.

Neither of us tried to say something useful.

Eventually she whispered:

“My father knew it was a boy.”

I looked at her.

“What?”

“I told him three days before.”

Victor had spent his whole life telling Clara that sons carried families.

He had eight.

Yet the moment he learned his daughter was carrying a boy, something strange happened.

He began calling more.

He asked whether we had chosen a name.

He asked whether the baby would use Bellandi as a middle name.

Clara thought it was his awkward way of softening.

Now she understood it differently.

“He asked about Mom’s trust the same night,” she said.

That interested me.

“Exactly what did he ask?”

“Whether my child would inherit my shares if something happened to me.”

I stopped breathing for a second.

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. That I didn’t know.”

Nathan checked the trust immediately.

The answer was complicated.

If Clara died, her interest passed first to her descendants.

Our unborn son would have become the beneficiary.

If Clara died without living descendants, Victor had a contingent claim to part of the voting interest under an older family structure.

The pregnancy changed that.

A living child would push Victor farther away from Teresa’s shares permanently.

The attack had taken our son from us.

But I refused to jump to the darkest conclusion without evidence.

Ruiz felt the same.

“Motive is not proof of intent,” she warned.

She was right.

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Still, for the first time, I saw why Victor had asked the question.

And why Clara’s pregnancy may have mattered to the timetable.