My Ex Faked Her Marriage To Hide My Son \u2014 But Her Reason Broke Me
Part 2
She looked up at me from the worn rug, tears streaming down her pale face, and told me that my own father had orchestrated the entire nightmare.
My father, the formidable Lord Henry, had visited her father’s rural vicarage on the very night we had planned to elope to Scotland.
He had walked into her home and placed a forged ledger on the desk, fabricated documents that would falsely prove her father had been embezzling funds from the church and the Crown.
He told her he had the local magistrate in his pocket, and if she got on that train with me, her father would be arrested by morning and sent to prison to rot.
I felt as if the floorboards were giving way beneath my boots.
She clutched at the fabric of her faded dressing gown and revealed that his cruelty did not end there.
He knew she was carrying my child, having paid spies to watch her visit the apothecary for morning sickness remedies.
He had threatened to have her locked in an asylum for the mad, to take the child the moment it was born, and to cut me off from the family fortune entirely.
He dictated the breakup letter himself, standing over her while she wrote the lies that would shatter my soul.
He forced her onto a train to London with nothing but fifty pounds, warning that if she ever contacted me, he would destroy her family and take my son.
Silence descended upon the tiny, freezing parlor, heavy and suffocating.
I stood completely paralyzed, the weight of the last five years crashing down upon my shoulders.
The anger I had harbored toward her evaporated instantly, replaced by a blinding, white-hot hatred for the dead man whose title I now bore.
She had not abandoned me for wealth; she had sacrificed everything to protect her father, to protect me, and to protect our unborn child.
Before I could even find the words to speak, the soft creak of a floorboard echoed from the dark hallway.
I turned slowly to see a little boy standing in the doorway, clutching a small stuffed wool bear.
He rubbed his sleepy eyes, his golden curls a tangled, beautiful mess.
He mumbled for his mother, asking her why she was crying and who the loud man was.
Sarah scrambled to her feet and rushed to pull him behind her skirts, but Jack stepped around her.
His big, gray eyes locked onto mine.
For the first time in five long years, I fell to my knees.
The dampness of my soaked coat seeped into the rug as I lowered myself to his eye level.
I looked into a face that was a flawless mirror of my own, feeling a piece of my shattered soul finally click back into place.
I whispered hello, my voice cracking as tears finally breached my stoic exterior to mix with the rain on my cheeks.
I told him I was an old friend, and he reached out with a chubby finger to poke my wet coat, telling me I was very loud.
A breathless, watery chuckle escaped my lips, and I told him I was just shocked because I had found something very important that I had lost a long time ago.
I looked up at Sarah, realizing that my father had built a perfect, ironclad trap designed to ruin us even from beyond the grave.
I swore right then that I would tear down the men who enforced my father’s dead will, but how could I destroy a legal trap designed to outlive its maker?
