My Husband Ignored Me For Five Years — He Returned To Find A Son With His Exact Face

Part 2

“Yours,” I said, my voice completely devoid of any emotion as I turned my back on him.

I walked down the long, drafty corridor toward the kitchen wing without speeding my pace.

The floorboards groaned beneath my sensible leather shoes, but my pulse remained nothing more than a slow, dull throb at the base of my throat.

I could feel the heavy, oppressive silence radiating from the foyer behind me like a physical weight pressing against my shoulder blades.

Greg stood completely frozen as the water from his sodden coat pooled on the flagstones, seeping into the grout.

He didn’t go upstairs to the prepared master suite, nor did he ask the housekeeper for the hot meal he desperately needed.

He followed the path I had taken, his heavy boots echoing loudly through the quiet, freezing house.

He found me back in the library, standing by the desk methodically wiping spilled ink from the leather blotter with a piece of scrap linen.

He closed the heavy oak door behind him with a deafening click, and I coldly informed him he was dripping on one of the few Persian rugs we hadn’t sold.

He ignored the barb, crossing the room to stop on the opposite side of the massive mahogany desk.

He slammed his hands flat onto the wood, leaning forward with his knuckles entirely white.

He accused me of hiding a son from him, his voice vibrating with a restrained fury as he claimed I let him sit in foreign courts ignorant of his own heir.

I tossed the stained linen into the dying fire, watching a brief plume of acrid smoke rise up the chimney.

I held his furious gaze without a trace of hesitation, stating I hid absolutely nothing.

His voice rose in a frantic demand to know how his son could be kept a secret, but I immediately raised a single hand, pointing upward to warn him the boy was a light sleeper.

I walked around the desk, kneeling down to yank open the warped bottom drawer that stuck from the dampness of the room.

I reached inside and pulled out the thick, heavy rectangular bundle bound tightly in rough brown twine.

I stood up and dropped it onto the desk with a dead thud, kicking up a tiny puff of dust between us.

He stared at it in confusion, and I told him in a terrifyingly calm voice that it was one hundred and four letters.

I pulled the twine, and the thick stack of envelopes spilled across the dark wood, fanning out like a deck of morbid playing cards.

Every single one was sealed, and every single one bore the unbroken red wax crest of the diplomatic courier service.

I explained that they were returned to me marked undeliverable, and he hadn’t even bothered to open them to reject them.

I picked up letter number thirty-six, its edges yellowed and curled, and told him it was written after thirty hours of labor while the sheets were still soaked with my blood.

I threw it directly at his chest, letting it slide down his waistcoat to land on the floor at his muddy boots.

I told him I didn’t hide his son, he just didn’t care to look.

As he fell to his knees on the freezing floor, surrounded by the unopened letters of my suffering, I wondered if this broken man could ever actually mend what he had shattered?