A Million Dollars Too Late Chapter 10

A Million Dollars Too Late Chapter 10

Audrey’s POV

I didn’t die.

After I stopped breathing in the prison infirmary, Dr. Evelyn Hart found that my pulse hadn’t completely

vanished.

She performed emergency resuscitation. And she discovered my baby.

Dr. Evelyn knew the guards inside the prison had been bought by Valeria. If news got out that I was still alive,

they’d just throw me back in my cell, and I’d die for real this time.

So she contacted an old colleague who worked in the medical examiner’s office.

That same night, the morgue received an unidentified female body-roughly my age and build.

The face was so bloated it was almost unrecognizable. They put my ID bracelet on her, switched the

fingerprint records, and faked the death report.

The brain cancer was real. The pregnancy was real. The only lie was my death.

Dr. Evelyn smuggled me out of Chicago and got me into that million-dollar experimental surgery.

After the operation, I was in a coma for eleven days. But the baby-against all odds-survived.

Three days after I woke up, Dr. Evelyn set a tablet in front of me.

Marcello’s photo filled the screen. The headline read: [Former Ravello Don Dies of Self-Inflicted Gunshot at

Lake Forest Estate.]

The article said he’d publicly admitted to judicial interference before his death and had submitted the

evidence to clear my name.

He’d liquidated all his personal assets. Half went to brain cancer research and a fund for low-income

patients. The other half went to Chicago’s foster homes and child protection agencies.

He left nothing to the Ravello family. He didn’t even leave himself a grave.

I stared at the news for a long time without saying a word. I thought I’d feel sad. Or maybe vindicated. I felt nothing at all.

His death couldn’t bring my father back. It couldn’t restore my mother’s legs. It couldn’t erase a single thing I had endured in that prison.

Dr. Evelyn asked, “He left a letter for you. Do you want to read it?”

I shook my head. “No. A dead man doesn’t get to decide when the living should forgive.”

I closed the news article. It was the last time I ever looked at Marcello’s face.

Five months later, I gave birth to a boy. He was healthy. He smiled all the time.

I gave him my last name. Lane.

After the court overturned my conviction, I received a settlement for wrongful imprisonment.

I took my mother and my son and left Chicago. We started over in Boston.

My mother would never walk again, but she was finally out of the ICU. I finished my follow-up treatments and

started working again.

Three years later, my son was messing around on an old tablet and stumbled onto that news article.

He pointed at Marcello’s photo and asked, “Mommy, who is that?”

I glanced at the face I once knew by heart. “Someone who’s no longer part of our lives.”

He didn’t push the question. A second later, he ran into the garden to give his grandmother the flowers he’d

just picked.

I never told him Marcello Ravello was his biological father.

All he’s ever known is that he’s been loved fiercely by his mother and his grandmother since the day he was

born.

He doesn’t need to carry the Ravello name. He doesn’t need to know what happened in Chicago’s underworld.

And he sure as hell doesn’t need to suffer for the sins of the generation before him.

That evening, I took his hand and we walked out the front door together.

The sun fell warm on our shoulders. There were no iron gates in the distance, no guards, no one ordering me

where I had to go.

The caged bird had finally found her freedom.

And this time, I didn’t fly to another man.

I just took my child and flew back to a sky that belonged to me.