Chapter 149
Gabriel’s POV
The first forty-eight hours were the longest of my life.
And I’ve lived through nights that felt endless. The night of my wedding to Victoria, when I lay beside a stranger and stared at the ceiling until dawn. The night Gabriela disappeared from her wedding and I stood frozen beneath the oak tree, unable to move. The night Victoria drugged me and I woke up not knowing what she had done to me.
But none of those nights compares to sitting beside your eleven-month-old son’s hospital bed while his fever rises and falls like a tide you can’t tell will recede or swallow everything whole.
I spent the first night in the plastic chair next to the crib without moving. Lucía was on the other side, on the cot the nurse had set up for her, though she barely used it. Every fifteen minutes she got up to check the monitor and press her fingers to Matías’s forehead, as if her touch could read his temperature better than the machine.
The fever hit forty point two at four in the morning.
The IV antibiotics had been running for six hours with no visible effect yet. The nebulizers every four hours opened his airways just enough for him to breathe easier for about an hour, and then the wheezing came back as if it had never left.
“It’s normal in the first twenty-four hours,” the doctor said during her morning check. “Antibiotics take between twenty-four and thirty-six hours to show real effect. The high fever is how his body fights the infection. As long as it doesn’t exceed forty point five, we’re within expected range.”
Within expected range.
Doctor words for we’re not in emergency territory yet, but we’re not safe either.
Lucía nodded with that look nurses wear when they fully understand the prognosis—but as mothers, cannot accept it.
Doña Marta arrived at eight that morning with a bag of clean clothes for Lucía and a small box of homemade cookies no one ate, but which stayed on the bedside table like proof that grandmothers still believe food fixes everything.
She sat beside Matías’s crib and took his tiny hand with the gentleness of a woman who has raised three children and six nephews and knows exactly how much pressure a sick baby’s hand can take.
“And you’re the father?” she asked, looking straight at me.
“I am.”
“Lucía didn’t tell me.”
“She was protecting us. Me and the baby.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m here. And I’m not leaving.”
Doña Marta studied me with that mother’s gaze that weighs your soul in three seconds.
“You’d better not.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you have money to pay for this hospital?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you intend to take responsibility?”
“For everything. The hospital. Lucía. Matías. Whatever they need. For the rest of my life.”
She nodded once. No smile. No hug. Just that decisive nod of strong women who don’t need more than a firm statement to decide whether to trust you.
“Alright then. You’re welcome in this family. But if you hurt my daughter or my grandson, I will personally find you and rip off what’s hanging between your legs. Are we clear?”
“Crystal clear, ma’am.”
Lucía let out a small laugh from the bed—half relief, half exhaustion. The first laugh I’d heard from her in two days.
The rest of those first forty-eight hours blurred into hospitals, calls, and parallel crises I had to manage from that plastic chair in room four, my arm bandaged, my phone my only tool.
Connecticut police questioned me three times.
The first time was at the hospital, ten in the morning on day one. Two detectives with notebooks had me recount everything—from entering the property to the shot in the basement. I told them the truth. All of it. I told them I shot Victoria in the forehead while she held a knife to Lucía’s neck. I told them I would do it again. I told them her body was in the basement.
The family lawyer Daniel Reyes sent from Manhattan attended all three interrogations, and after each one he told me the same thing.
“Clear self-defense. You had a kidnapped woman with a neck wound and an armed captor. Any prosecutor in this country closes this in a week.”
“You’re sure?”
“Gabriel, I’ve defended worse in thirty years. This is the cleanest case I’ve ever seen. Don’t worry about the legal side. Worry about your son.”
So I worried about my son.
And the company.
And the media circus that erupted when the press connected the dots: the hack at Moretti Enterprises, the Harrington arrests, the Greenwich shootout, and Victoria’s death in a basement.
The tabloids exploded.
News channels ran specials.
Social media turned it into a global trend in under twelve hours.
I couldn’t step outside the hospital without cameras flashing from the parking lot.
My father handled the company.
Him, Mateo, and Andrés running operations like a war cabinet. The Chinese penalties were renegotiated thanks to the Valmont merger. Exposed contracts were shielded with lawsuits against the hackers. Valmont liquidity filled the gaps. And somehow, by day three, the market stabilized—because a Moretti-Valmont conglomerate looked stronger than any scandal.
My father called every four hours. Not about numbers.
About Matías.
“How is the boy?”
“Fever’s down to thirty-eight point nine. Antibiotics are starting to work.”
“And Lucía?”
“Barely sleeping. Doña Marta makes her eat, but she can’t keep it down.”
“And you?”
“I’m here, Dad.”
“Rest, Gabriel.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. Your son needs you whole, not broken.”
“Don’t ask me to sleep while my son has a forty-degree fever.”
“I’m not asking you to sleep. I’m asking you to close your eyes for five minutes. Eat something. Let your mother take care of you while I handle the company. Can you do that?”
“I’ll try.”
“Try.”
My mother arrived every day at seven in the morning and stayed until eleven at night.
Aurora Moretti—full-time grandmother now—in a Connecticut hospital corridor, bringing homemade soup in containers for the daughter-in-law she hadn’t even known existed.
Because my mother adopted Lucía in about forty-five seconds.
No formal introduction. No speech. Just my mother walking into the room that first day, eyes already wet, looking at Lucía holding Matías, and saying:
“You’re braver than I ever was. Welcome to this family.”
Lucía cried.
My mother cried.
Doña Marta cried.
Gabriela cried.
I didn’t. I had nothing left. But inside, I was shattered in a way that would probably take years to understand.
And then there was the funeral.
Victoria’s funeral.
Because someone had to bury her. And her parents were in federal custody, cut off from everything.
The funeral home called the emergency contact listed in her records.
Mine.
I went on day three.
I didn’t want to. Every part of me wanted to stay with Matías and Lucía. But I went.
Because someone had to sign.
The funeral home was small. Soft lighting. An open casket I hadn’t requested.
Victoria Harrington lay on white silk, hands folded. The hole in her forehead covered with makeup.
Almost invisible.
Almost.
I stood there for a full minute.
I didn’t feel hatred.
That surprised me.
What I felt was exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that comes when you look at the body of the person who destroyed your life and realize she was already broken long before you met her.
“I’m sorry, Victoria,” I said quietly. “Not for what I did. But for what was done to you.”
I signed the papers. Chose cremation. No ceremony.
Sent the ashes to her father’s lawyer.
And I never thought about her again.
By day four, Matías’s fever dropped to thirty-seven point eight.
The doctor came in with new blood results—and for the first time, her face wasn’t guarded.
“White count is down. Inflammation markers improving. Chest X-ray shows recovery. The antibiotics are working.”
Lucía closed her eyes as tears fell.
“He’s going to be okay?”
“He’s going to be okay. Forty-eight more hours on IV antibiotics, then we switch to oral and discharge him.”
“Discharge?”
“In two days, if everything continues like this.”
Lucía looked at Matías. Then at me.
And smiled.
Small. Fragile. But real.
That afternoon, Gabriela brought a stuffed toy. A penguin.
“Didn’t find anything else,” she shrugged.
Lucía and I looked at each other.
“A penguin,” I said.
“A penguin,” she echoed.
“Is there a story?” Gabriela asked.
“Long one,” I said. “But it’s perfect.”
Matías grabbed the penguin’s flipper… and fell asleep holding it.
The sixth night was the first Lucía slept more than three hours straight.
Matías slept too.
Really slept.
No wheezing. No alarms. Just peaceful breathing.
Lucía lay on the cot, one hand hanging toward the crib, as if even in sleep she needed to be sure he was still there.
I was in my chair.
My chair.
Six nights in that chair. My back would never forgive me. I didn’t care.
I watched my son sleep.
Eleven months I hadn’t lived. Eleven months I would spend the rest of my life trying to make up for.
Lucía woke at one-thirty.
She sat up immediately, checked the monitor, then relaxed.
Then she saw me.
“You’re awake.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“You haven’t slept in six nights.”
“I haven’t slept in a year.”
She got up, walked barefoot, and sat half on the chair, half on me.
I held her.
We watched Matías together.
“Gabriel.”
“What?”
“Forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“I hid your son for eleven months.”
“You protected him.”
“I didn’t know how to do anything else.”
“You did more than enough.”
“He ended up here. Sick.”
“He’s alive. Strong. Fighting. That’s because of you.”
She squeezed my hand.
“Ten days?”
“He turns one in ten days.”
“We need a party.”
“He’s getting the biggest party New York has ever seen.”
She smiled faintly.
Then leaned against me.
“Gabriel… there’s your family.”
I looked at the crib.
“My whole family,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter how long it took you,” she whispered. “It matters that you came.”
“I came.”
“And you’re not leaving.”
“I’m not.”
“Then all that matters is that we start living. Together. For real.”
“For real.”
We stayed like that.
In a plastic chair.
At one-thirty in the morning.
Watching our son sleep.
And for the first time in over a year…
It felt like a beginning.