My Husband Ignored Me For Months — Until I Found The Forged Letter That Ruined Us
Part 2
The heavy parchment felt like burning coals against my trembling fingertips.
The handwriting was a graceful, looping script that looked exactly like my own.
But as I read the agonizing words, the blood in my veins turned to absolute ice.
“My dearest Tyler, my heart aches constantly for you.”
“This impending marriage to the Duke is a cold prison, but I will endure it patiently until we can finally be together again.”
I stopped reading and practically threw the paper onto the small tea table.
“This is not my handwriting,” I said, my voice shaking with sudden, violent rage.
“Look closely at the ink strokes.
The loop on the Y is entirely wrong.”
He picked the letter back up.
I watched sheer doubt and desperate hope wage a violent war across his handsome face.
“Then who wrote it?” he whispered, his voice cracking.
“I do not know, but I swear to you, I have never loved Lord Tyler.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath, the truth bubbling up uncontrollably.
“I have never loved any man except…”
I stopped abruptly, my throat catching on the heavy words.
I had been about to say except you, but the vulnerable words simply would not come.
Craig rose slowly from his chair and walked to the tall window.
“All these miserable months,” he said, his voice breaking.
“All these months I truly believed you despised the very sight of me.”
“I kept my distance to desperately protect myself from the unbearable pain of knowing I could never have your heart.”
I sat absolutely frozen on the sofa, my untouched tea growing cold beside me.
“You wanted my heart?”
I whispered.
He turned fully to face me then.
“From the exact moment I first saw you,” he said hoarsely.
“It was at your coming out ball three years ago.
You wore a pale blue silk gown.”
He ran a trembling hand through his hair.
“I was too much of a terrified coward to approach you then.”
“I wrote you letters instead, dozens and dozens of them.
I poured my entire soul onto those pages, but I never sent a single one.”
The solid floor beneath my feet felt as though it were violently tilting.
“You wrote me letters?”
I asked, my voice barely a thread of sound.
He nodded silently.
“They are all in my study right now, locked securely in the bottom drawer of my heavy oak desk.”
“I could not bring myself to throw them into the fire, and I could not bring myself to hand them to you.”
I rose slowly from the sofa, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
“I want to see them immediately.”
We walked together in complete silence through the quiet corridors of Brentwood Hall to his private study.
He unlocked the heavy bottom drawer with a small brass key.
He carefully withdrew a thick bundle of envelopes tied tightly with a faded blue ribbon.
“Read them,” he commanded softly.
“They will finally tell you everything I could never say out loud.”
As I opened the very first letter he had written me three years ago, a single, terrifying question formed in my mind.
Who could have hated us both enough to meticulously forge that letter and steal our happiness?
