Chapter 3
“By keeping me awake?”
“No.”
Dominic rubbed both hands over his face.
“The first thing I put in the tea wasn’t a stimulant.”
“What was it?”
“Something Dr. Vale recommended.”
Adrian’s confusion deepened.
“Vale?”
Dominic looked up sharply.
“You know about him.”
“I know you saw him.”
Dominic laughed once.
Not because anything was funny.
“Of course Marco found that.”
“Why did you see my doctor?”
“Because you wouldn’t listen to him.”
“What does that mean?”
“He told you your insomnia was connected to stress. To grief. To the way you were living.”
“I remember.”
“You fired him.”
“I stopped seeing him.”
“You called him incompetent.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened.
It had been a bad year.
Their mother had died.
Several businesses were unstable.
Adrian had begun waking every hour convinced there was some problem he had overlooked.
“He suggested a mild herbal sleep aid,” Dominic continued. “I put it in your tea twice.”
Adrian felt cold.
“You drugged me.”
“I know.”
Dominic’s face tightened.
“I know how it sounds.”
“It sounds exactly like what it was.”
“I was desperate. You were sleeping forty minutes a night. You nearly collapsed at breakfast.”
“So you decided you knew better than I did?”
“Yes.”
The bluntness stunned him.
Dominic looked ashamed.
“I told myself it was helping. Then you found out something tasted different and stopped drinking it for a week. You became worse. Angry. Suspicious. And I…”
His voice faltered.
“What?”
“I made a different choice.”
Adrian waited.
Dominic’s eyes lifted to his.
“I realized how much easier everything was when you were tired.”
The sentence hung between them.
No excuse.
No dramatic denial.
Only a truth that seemed to cost Dominic something to say.
“I had spent my entire life waiting for you to trust me with anything important,” he continued. “Then suddenly you needed me. People called me instead of you. Contracts came to my desk. Decisions came to me.”
“So you kept it going.”
“At first I told myself I was protecting you from your own stubbornness.”
“At first?”
Dominic swallowed.
“Then I knew I was protecting my position.”
Adrian walked to the window.
He could see their reflections in the glass.
Two brothers in a room built by their grandfather.
“So the stimulant?”
“I switched to it later.”
“Why?”
“Because you began sleeping better.”
The answer was almost unbearable in its simplicity.
Adrian turned.
Dominic’s eyes were wet, though he made no effort to hide it.
“I kept thinking I would stop,” he said. “Every night I told myself that was the last time. Then morning came and you handed me another responsibility, and I liked who I was when people needed me.”
Adrian looked away.
He wanted fury.
Fury would have been easier.
Instead he felt grief.
Not for the lost sleep.
For the brother who had been sitting across from him all these years pretending everything was normal.
“Why tell me now?”
“Because you asked.”
“That never stopped you from lying before.”
“No.”
Dominic reached into his jacket.
Adrian tensed without meaning to.
Dominic noticed.
Pain crossed his face.
Slowly, he removed an envelope and placed it on the table.
“I was going to give you this tomorrow.”
“What is it?”
“My resignation from every Moretti company.”
Adrian stared at the envelope.
“I don’t expect forgiveness.”
“Good.”
Dominic nodded.
“I do expect consequences.”
“What consequences?”
“Whatever the board decides. Whatever you decide about the businesses. I won’t fight you.”
Adrian looked at his brother for a long time.
Then another question came to him.
“Why did you keep the receipt from Vale?”
Dominic frowned.
“I didn’t.”
“Marco found one near your office.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Two years old. Your name. Vale’s clinic.”
Dominic stood.
“I saw Vale once, three years ago.”
Adrian felt a new unease.
“Then why would there be a receipt from two years ago?”
“I don’t know.”
Dominic crossed the room.
“Show me.”
Adrian studied his face.
The confusion looked genuine.
For the first time that day, something shifted.
Not enough to erase what Dominic had admitted.
Enough to suggest another piece remained missing.
Dominic examined the receipt twice.
Then his face changed.
“What?”
“This wasn’t mine.”
“Your name is on it.”
“I know.”
Dominic pointed to the date.
“I was in Montreal that week.”
Adrian remembered.
A three-day conference.
“You’re certain?”
“Completely.”
He looked at the clinic address.
Then at Adrian.
“There’s only one other person who knew I had gone to Vale.”
“Who?”
Dominic hesitated.
“Aunt Elena.”
Neither brother spoke.
May you like
Upstairs, somewhere beyond the closed library door, a floorboard creaked.
And Adrian suddenly understood that Dominic’s betrayal might be real without being the whole truth.
