Chapter 12 - The Son He Chose
I confronted David that night in Evelyn’s conference room with two lawyers present.
He looked smaller without our house around him.
“Tyler is your son,” I said.
“Yes.”
No excuse.
No denial.
“How long have you and Angela been together?”
He stared at the table.
“On and off since before Tyler was born.”
My chest hurt, but my voice stayed steady.
“Before our wedding?”
“Yes.”
Eighteen years collapsed into one syllable.
“Why marry me?”
His eyes finally lifted.
“I loved you.”
I laughed.
“No. Try again.”
He flinched.
“My father’s company needed your family’s contracts back then. Later things changed.”
“Things changed into fraud?”
“I was trying to save hundreds of jobs.”
“With my mother’s property.”
“We would have been secure.”
“We?”
He looked away.
I slid the Tyler beneficiary page toward him.
“You mean you, Angela, and your son.”
He said nothing.
That silence hurt more than the affair photographs.
I had spent years grieving children I never had while my husband secretly fathered one with my best friend.
“You let me call him my godson.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“For seventeen years?”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
Then Evelyn asked the question I could not.
“Did Rebecca’s mother discover the paternity?”
David froze.
I leaned forward.
“Did she?”
He whispered, “Yes.”
“When?”
“Before she died.”
“What did she do?”
“She threatened to tell you everything.”
My pulse hammered.
“And then she had a stroke nine days later.”
David stood suddenly.
“I did not kill your mother.”
No one had accused him yet.
Then Evelyn’s phone rang.
She listened for ten seconds.
May you like
“Rebecca,” she said, “the hospital preserved your mother’s toxicology samples.”
And someone had just requested them under Angela’s name.
