“He told me I was imagining things. That my illness made me suspicious. That I should rest.”
My brother’s voice cracked slightly as he kept reading.
“I believed him. Because when you love someone for decades, you learn to doubt yourself before you doubt them.”
Silence pressed in.
“But I kept watching. Quietly. And that is when I understood something worse. The child everyone believes belongs to another man… is his.”
“No,” I whispered.
Robert nodded. “He’s Dad’s.”
I shook my head over and over. “That can’t be true. Someone would have noticed.”
“She did. Eventually.”
Robert continued reading.
“Once I knew that, everything made sense. Why he stayed. Why he never left. Why he played the role of a devoted husband while living a second life beside me.”
The words felt like knives.
“It wasn’t love that kept him here. It was safety. What I owned. What he would lose if he walked away.”
My nails dug into my palms.
“She believed they were waiting,” Robert finally said. “Waiting for her to die. Waiting to be together openly. Waiting to inherit what she built.”
I jumped to my feet so abruptly that the chair shrieked across the floor.
“No. That’s not—”
“She didn’t confront them,” Robert cut in. “She prepared. She quietly revised her will. Legally. Everything was left to us.”
I stared at him. “So Dad gets nothing. Laura gets nothing.”
A brittle laugh escaped me—sharp, unsteady.
“So this wedding, all of it—”
“They believe they’ve already won,” Robert said.
The door swung open.
“Claire?” my father called. “Are you all right in there?”
Robert folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope.
“Yes,” I answered. “We’ll be out in a moment.”
The door shut again.
I swallowed. “What do we do?”
Outside, the music swelled.
The cake was about to be cut.
And my father had no idea his celebration was on the verge of becoming a reckoning.
We returned to the reception together. Dad spotted us immediately and smiled in relief.
“There you are. I was starting to worry.”
“We need to talk,” I said.
Continue reading…
