My Best Friend Showed Up With My Don Husband’s Heir

My name is Clara Kelly. I was born in Brooklyn, into an Irish-American cop’s family.

My father spent his whole career walking a beat out of the 84th Precinct. My mother volunteered at the parish. I was the first girl on our block to get into Columbia Law.

The year I graduated, I was volunteering at a charity gala. I picked up the wrong glass of wine and ended up dumping it down the front of a man’s Brioni suit.

That man was Adrian Francesco Moretti.

Fourth-generation Don of the Moretti Family of New York, and one of the five families of Cosa Nostra.

He chased me for four years. I said no six times. The seventh time, he stood outside my law firm in the rain until three-fifteen in the morning.

I married him.

Two decades in, he’d handed me the keys to the entire Moretti Family. In our world they called me “the Irish Donna,” a woman with no Italian blood who somehow held the seat.

Childless by choice, the two of us. Famously in love.

Until that Wednesday afternoon, when my college roommate of twenty years, my best friend Vivian Sinclair, walked into my living room with a five-year-old boy.

She said the boy was Adrian’s son.

She said that five years ago, she’d taken a used condom out of the wastebasket in my upstairs master bedroom, kept it frozen for three years, and done IVF.

She said she was the real mother of the Moretti heir. She was the real Donna Moretti.

“Be smart. Pack your bags and walk out. You might even get to keep your life.”

“You’re barren. The Moretti Family doesn’t need you.”

I looked at the woman I’d called my best friend for half my adult life.

I didn’t say a word.

She thought she was holding the winning card.

What she didn’t know was that she’d just stepped onto a board Adrian and I had been laying for twenty years.

I needed exactly one sentence to shatter every piece of the Donna fantasy she’d spent five years building.

When our housekeeper Martha called, I was in Midtown Manhattan, chairing a board meeting at one of the Moretti Family’s legitimate publicly-traded hotel groups.

“Mrs. Moretti, we have a problem at the house.” Martha’s voice was barely above a whisper. “A Miss Sinclair showed up with a little boy. She’s insisting she’s the real Mrs. Moretti.”

“She says the boy is Mr. Moretti’s son. Five years old. The only male heir to the Moretti Family.”

I set my Montblanc down on the conference table.

“Martha. What does she have?”

“Mrs. Moretti, she has a DNA test.”

I told my assistant to clear the rest of my afternoon. On my way out, I looked at Vincent across the table. “You have full authority on this end.”

Vincent Moretti is Adrian’s Consigliere and his right hand. He’s been with us for thirty years, and nobody knows better than him what the words “male heir” mean