20. Declan
Declan
I stare down at the photos, my fingers crumpling the edges. Jealousy claws at me and I want to rip them to shreds, but it still won’t change that she’s not mine. Alarm is still ringing sharply that Silvia would have followed Lily, or paid someone else to.
She’s becoming more unpredictable and hyper-focused on my wife.
Soon to be ex-wife.
Will she be my ex-wife after an annulment, or do we actually just pretend this never happened? Because I don’t think I can do that. I don’t want to do that.
Looking up at her, I see the remnants of her night out lingering on her face in the paleness of her skin and her reddened eyes.
“You sure you wanna do this now?” I ask gently, and she lowers her lashes, hiding her blue eyes. After a moment, she nods and walks over to the couch. I take the opposite side from her, knowing she wouldn’t want me to sit any closer.
I set the photos down on the coffee table as her expression twitches with impatience.
“I need to understand, Declan,” she says stiffly.
“I need to know why.” Her teeth clamp down on her bottom lip, showing me the smallest peek of that gap between her two front teeth, and my chest pinches tightly.
She’s right there, the familiar scent of her shampoo filling the air, and all I want to do is lean over and drag her into my arms, but she’s staring back at me like I’m a stranger.
“When your mother disappeared, my father was furious,” I say quietly.
“How would you know that?” She frowns, tilting her head.
I palm the back of my neck, staring down at the floor.
“I remember Gloria. Not in any real detail. Most of it came from Donald himself. He would talk about how Grant screwed him over, taking what was his and destroying it. He never explicitly said Gloria’s name, but I picked up enough to be suspicious.
When I started looking into it, I talked to any staff that were employed at the house back then, and started making the connections. ”
I glance at her out of the corner of my eye, and her jaw is tight, eyes glinting like shards of ice. “When did you start looking into it properly?”
She already knows, but I give her the answer anyway. “Just before we met, when my father asked me to handle the acquisition of Hi-Tech.”
For several minutes, she doesn’t speak, her cheeks pale and teeth gritted.
Just when I think she’s not going to say anything, she murmurs, “I think I’d been convincing myself that you can’t have known it all.
” Her brows dip together, forming a divot between them.
“But you did, didn’t you? That day in the coffee shop, when you bumped into me, you knew about the affair.
” Her eyes go wide, and she leans towards me.
“Do you know where she is? Does your father?”
“No,” I say quickly, hating the disappointment creeping into her eyes. “Donald’s tried. As soon as he realized she was gone, he tried looking for. He’s hired several PIs over the years, but never found a single trace.”
“Did he know she was pregnant?” My mouth drops open, genuine shock crossing my features, and she mumbles, “That’s something, I guess.
If you knew that my mom and you… that they were…
” she scrunches her face up in disgust. “Right from the beginning. So, how did you know that you and I weren’t related? ”
I clear my throat. “My father paid someone to hack into Grant’s emails more than once over the years.
At some point, an email from a lab was retrieved with the DNA test results.
” She doesn’t look surprised, so I guess Grant already told her he’d had it done, but my relief that I haven’t dropped another bomb on her is short-lived.
She looks away from me, her lips pressing together.
“I never truly knew you at all, did I? The person I thought I married would never be so needlessly cruel. What did I do to deserve this?” She barks out a harsh laugh.
“In fact, what did my father even do? Seems like he should be the one out for revenge.” When she looks back, I watch as her eyes visibly ice over, like she’s strengthening up her defenses. Protecting herself.
I don’t answer her, but she doesn’t seem to need me to, her upper lip curling into a sneer. “Your father,” she seethes, “was married with children, just like she was. Their affair—my father and I were victims, so why? Why the conspiracy to get Donald’s hands on Hi-Tech?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about my father, Lily. A lot I never shared with you.”
“Not a great place to start,” she mutters, and I shoot her a look.
“Donald is…” I swallow hard, looking down.
“I guess the best way to put it is that he doesn’t feel things the way other people do.
He doesn’t love like other people. In his eyes, his children are just extensions of himself, like a limb.
I… We are something to control, manipulate and punish.
My mother, she was a burden that Donald’s father strapped around his neck in the name of business and money,” I spit the last word out. “And Donald never pretended otherwise.”
There was a lot I wasn’t saying, especially about what happened in our home as I was growing up, but this wasn’t about making Lily feel sorry for me.
No matter what had driven me, I’d made my own choices.
“Your mother… I don’t know much about Gloria’s relationship with him.
But from what he’s said, it was toxic. Their parents got married when they were in their early teens, and they started up almost straight away.
He saw her as his property, something that he owned even after he got married.
In his head, being with my mother changed nothing, but Gloria was never supposed to get married.
When she and Grant tied the knot, he was furious.
” Slight understatement, according to the packet my own PI had put together for me.
“At her?”
“No, at Grant. Donald blamed him for stealing something from him. He never let Gloria go, always luring her back into his tangled, vicious web whenever he felt like she might pull away. When she disappeared, he lost his mind, but every ounce of anger and blame went straight in Grant’s direction.”
She clenched her hands in her lap. “Donald told you all this?”
“Some,” I admit. “But he knows how to play the game, knowing exactly what to share and what to hold back. I put the rest together myself over the past year.”
The look in her eyes was dull, and I clenched my fingers into the fabric of my pants, stopping myself from reaching out.
“Where do I fit in?” she asks. “And the company?” My mouth opens and then immediately shuts again, my stomach clenching. She rolls her eyes. “Oh, come off it, Declan,” she says with a scoff. “There’s no universe where you don’t look worse than you already do.”
I run a frustrated hand through my hair.
“Dad wanted revenge for Grant kicking Gloria out. He thought that if Grant had just accepted the baby as his, everything could’ve stayed the same.
” Disgust darkens my voice. “It was a game for him, turning Grant into a cuck. Every time Gloria came to him, he was winning. Grant ruined it, and he hated that.” I swipe my tongue over my bottom lip, carefully averting my eyes from her, not wanting to see her face.
“He thought taking Hi-Tech would be the best way to make Grant suffer, but he waited, wanting to set it all in motion at the perfect time. One day, I guess he saw you at a charity gala and his plans changed. He figured Grant had stolen his child, and…” I trail off, not liking the look on her face.
“And you agreed.”
It was a damning sentence. Three words that tore through me like shrapnel, even as they rang like a death knell through my head.
“Lily—”
“I think that’s enough for today,” she interrupts.
Without looking at me, she stands. I don’t move, my body trembling as adrenaline surges.
But there’s nowhere for it to go, and no one for me to fight.
Not when she’s at the door and opening it.
She steps to the side, staring off into the distance as she waits for me to move my ass.
I swallow hard, scooping the pictures off the table and walking toward her. She doesn’t move, barely breathing as I pause beside her, keeping her eyes carefully averted. I don’t look away, my expression open and hoping she hears the sincerity in my voice.
“I agreed, but—” I shake my head with a wince.
“I don’t regret spending that year with you, Lily, as much of an asshole as that might make me.
I don’t regret it because you opened my eyes to what life could be, and how I was letting him ruin it for me without ever fighting back.
” Her shoulders tremble, but she still doesn’t look at me.
“Long before our wedding day, I’d decided to break away from him.
Not just because of him, but because of you.
I wanted better for the family we were creating, but I needed more time. ”
“You have all the time in the world now,” she utters quietly.
“No,” I shake my head. “I don’t. Please, Lily. I was never just going to hand Hi-Tech over to Donald. Not when I knew what it meant to you and Grant.”
She smiles, but it’s a defeated curve of her lips. “If only I could believe a word you’re saying. It’s too late, Declan. You made your choice a long time ago, and it was never me.”
“Don’t say that please. I won’t stop fighting for us. For you. You’re my family now, Lily, and I won’t lose you.”
It’s like she doesn’t hear me. “You know, if you’d told me about all of this before we got married, maybe we could have salvaged something.
” She lets out a weak laugh that fades into a sigh.
“Hell, I might even have helped you. Instead, I found out you were lying to me from the get-go. Not only that, but every single person, including Silvia, knew about it.” She looks at me then, her blue eyes blazing with a catastrophic mix of anger and devastation.
“And now, thanks to all this, I find out that my father has also been lying to me for years.”
She nods her head towards the door, and I don’t argue, stepping out onto the porch, turning back to her. She stands there, clutching the edge of the door, her eyes dropping to the photos in my hand.
“Get your bitch under control,” she tells me. “I don’t need any more of her poison in my life.” There’s a thread of anger in her voice, a stark contrast from the restrained version she’s been throwing at me, and my heart skips a beat.
The door shuts with finality, and I let myself feel the desolation for a minute.
Sixty seconds, each one passing with me standing there, staring at her closed door, feeling every single drop of pain that I’d caused flowing through my veins. I’d done this, destroyed something precious because of my fear of a man who should no longer have that power over me.
But I know what I’m fighting for now.
I turn away and step off the porch, heading for my car, each step filling me with renewed determination.
Lily knows everything now, the whole sordid history that has blackened the past year with her, even when she didn’t know it.
She might not know every detail of my relationship with my father, but she’ll find out that I’d walk through hell to win her back, even when it means losing everything else I’d ever worked for.