“Promise you won’t interrupt. Not until I’m finished.”

I nodded. He broke the seal. The paper inside was carefully folded, the handwriting neat and achingly familiar.

“It starts like a farewell,” Robert said softly. “She wrote it knowing she wouldn’t be there to explain.”

He took a steadying breath and began to read.

“My sweet children. If you’re reading this, then my fears were true. And it also means I didn’t live long enough to protect you myself.”

I clamped a hand over my mouth.

“I didn’t tell you while I was alive because I didn’t want my final months consumed by conflict. I was already exhausted. I was already in pain. I wanted my last days to be filled with love, not spent exposing betrayals.”

My chest tightened.

“I found out by accident. Messages I wasn’t supposed to see. Dates that didn’t line up. Money that moved quietly, carefully, as if someone believed I would never notice.”

My hands started to shake.

“At first, I convinced myself I was wrong. That fear was playing tricks on my mind.”

A pause. The paper rustled.

“But the truth doesn’t disappear just because you are too weak to face it. It wasn’t a stranger. It was my own sister.”

I felt dizzy.

“I gave him one chance to be honest. I asked calmly. I wanted to believe there was an explanation I could live with.”

Tears burned behind my eyes.

“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—”

CONTINUE READING...>>

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