48. Caleb
CALEB
Iunlocked my bedroom door and marched down the stairs to the dining room, laptop and folder clutched tightly in my hands.
The vein in my neck throbbed, twitching with every step as sweat dripped down the side of my face and soaked into the collar of my shirt.
The wedding no longer mattered.
The guests arriving in a few hours no longer mattered.
Only the truth mattered now.
I reached the dining room and stopped abruptly.
My siblings sat around the table with their spouses while my father occupied his usual chair at the head. My mother sat beside him with a cup of coffee in her hands, speaking quietly to Catherine.
I dropped the folder onto the table with enough force to make everyone jump.
My mother’s eyes widened, the colour draining from her face.
My father frowned immediately. “Caleb?”
“What is this, Mum?” I asked, my voice low and strained.
Her lips parted, but no words came out.
Sophia glanced between us. “What’s going on?”
I placed the laptop down and opened it with shaking hands. My breathing had turned shallow somewhere between the staircase and this room.
“Tell them,” I said quietly, staring directly at my mother.
Tears instantly flooded her eyes.
“Caleb, I—”
“Tell them,” I roared, the sound tearing out of my chest before I could stop it.
The room fell silent.
My mother lowered her head and pressed trembling fingers against her forehead.
“I did it to protect you.”
A hollow laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
“Protect me?” I repeated. “By making me believe Jiya stole money from us? By making me believe she helped Jeremy kidnap your granddaughters? By making me believe she abandoned me?”
My mother had sabotaged my life.
My love.
My everything.
My chest tightened painfully as years of anger, grief, and regret crashed together inside me.
“You destroyed her.”
“That girl was dangerous,” my mother whispered weakly.
Every muscle in my body went rigid.
“Dangerous?” I barked.
“She came into your life carrying secrets, lies, trauma—”
“Or was it because of the lies you created for her?” I snapped.
I yanked the photographs from the folder and spread them across the table.
“These.” My hand shook as I pointed to the pictures of Caroline and me. “You changed the dates and showed it to her, and she believed that Caroline and I were having an affair when we weren’t. Isn’t that right?”
“Caleb… I…”
A thought suddenly entered my mind.
“Was it you who sent Caroline to my penthouse that day? The day you asked Taylor and Martina to come over?”
“Caleb… I was… Caleb…”
“Oh my God… oh my God…”
My father slowly picked one up while Sophia leaned closer to study it.
No one spoke.
My mother’s fumbling answered the question more loudly than words ever could.
I covered my face with my hands, pressing my palms against my eyes as if I could block out the truth. A sick feeling rolled through my stomach.
Suddenly, Jiya’s heartbreak made sense.
The distance.
The confusion in her eyes.
The way she had looked at me as though I had shattered something inside her.
I remembered the promise I had made to her after the accident with her daughter—that I would never assume things again. Never judge her without listening. Never doubt her love.
And yet I had done it again.
All this time, I had hated her for leaving while she had been carrying the weight of something my own mother had engineered.
I pressed play on the laptop.
The video began running.
No one spoke as the footage played.
By the time it ended, my father looked physically ill.
“You told us she stole the money,” he said slowly, staring at my mother. “You made every single one of us believe she was guilty. And I believed you, Eleanor, and doubted her… hated her for all these years. How could you, Eleanor?” he asked loudly.
My mother broke down into sobs.
“The letter…” Catherine whispered, picking up the page beside her. “This looks like her handwriting.”
“It’s similar,” I said hoarsely. “Close enough that I convinced myself it was hers because I wanted answers.” I swallowed hard and pointed toward the page. “But Jiya doesn’t write her ‘m’ and ‘y’ like that.”
I looked back at my mother.
“Tell us everything.”
She shook her head weakly, crying harder.
“Tell us,” my father yelled.
My mother inhaled shakily before speaking.
“This started years ago,” she whispered. “Long before any of you children became involved in the company. Your father trusted me with internal investigations and liability cases. HR directed serious incidents to me, and I handled them personally.”
Dad’s brows pulled together sharply. “You never told me that.”
“I handled it quietly,” she replied.
The knot in my chest tightened further.
“Carlos Sanchez was an employee, an industrial technician. The accident involving him became complicated very quickly, and the potential liability was enormous. If we had taken responsibility for his treatment, it would have set a precedent for every future claim,” she continued.
“The lawyers warned me about the financial exposure, the reputational damage, and the legal consequences that could follow.”
I ran my hands through my hair, shaking my head.
“So this was about protecting the company?”
“It was about protecting everything your father and I built. The company could have collapsed under the scrutiny and been dragged through the mud,” she cried. “Thousands of employees depended on that company surviving. I had to think about the bigger picture.”
“And what about the man who worked for us?” Dad asked quietly. “Did he not matter too?”
My mother covered her face briefly before lowering her hands again.
“I made a decision I thought was necessary, Randall.”
Silence settled heavily over the room.
Then she looked at me again.
“When Jiya entered your life, I investigated her because something felt wrong immediately,” she whispered.
“She was an orphan, a single mother, and came from a completely different world than ours. You had been raised a certain way, Caleb. You came from a family constantly under public scrutiny, and she… she brought chaos everywhere she went.”
Her breathing turned uneven.
“Then there was Tatiana. She understood our life. She understood our world, our expectations, our social circles. Everything with her felt stable… appropriate.”
My stomach twisted violently.
“You didn’t want someone I loved,” I said quietly, the realization hollowing out my chest. “You cared whether the woman beside me fit the image you wanted.”
Anger surged so violently through me that I had to grip the edge of the table to steady myself.
“And that justified ruining her life?”
“No,” she cried. “But then I discovered who her father was.”
The room went still.
Even my father froze.
My mother’s breathing became uneven as fresh tears slid down her cheeks.
“Everything from that case came rushing back,” she whispered. “The pressure. The fear. The threats from the lawyers. The possibility of losing everything. When I discovered she was his daughter, I panicked.”
My father stared at her, his mouth slackening.
“Ny—” He stopped abruptly, shaking his head as though correcting himself. “Jiya had nothing to do with what happened,” he growled.
My mother lowered her eyes.
“And yet you treated her as though his circumstance somehow made her dangerous.”
A cold chill crawled over my skin.
“Were you always this prejudiced?” I asked quietly, “Or did it start after you learned who her father was?”
She flinched visibly.
“I thought I was protecting you,” she whispered again.
I shook my head slowly.
“You didn’t protect me, Mum.” My voice cracked despite my effort to steady it. “You ruined and destroyed me.”
Tears streamed down her face.
“When your accident happened… when Jeremy returned… when the girls were kidnapped…” She pressed a trembling hand against her mouth.
“It confirmed every fear I already had. I was certain that she might use that connection against us if she ever discovered who her father was… that she might expose what happened or try to force us into paying for something we could never admit publicly.”
“You mean every lie you convinced yourself to believe,” Sophia snapped.
My mother looked shattered.
“Her father had asked for money once,” she continued, her hands trembling as she clasped them together.
“HR directed him to me after the accident, and he came to my office desperate and pleading for help. When I refused, he accepted the decision quietly, but the situation stayed with me. I knew how easily financial desperation could turn into resentment… into lawsuits… into revenge.”
My jaw clenched as heat surged through my chest.
“And the DNA test?” I asked. “The surveillance? The investigations?”
“I needed proof,” she whispered helplessly. “Something to justify what I felt. I saw her background and her past, and I convinced myself history was repeating itself.”
Her voice cracked harder.
“You were my son, Caleb. Mine to protect. I became so consumed with protecting you that I stopped seeing what I was doing to her. And every time I looked at her, I saw risk. I saw someone who could pull you into instability, scandal, and pain. I convinced myself she wanted your money, your name, your security… because I couldn’t understand why someone like her would fit into this family otherwise. ”
My father exhaled slowly. His expression was grim, his shoulders tense in a way I had rarely seen before.
“You judged that girl because of her father,” he said quietly, looking directly at my mother.
“A man who was desperate to live after an accident that happened in our own company.” His jaw ticked.
“Jiya didn’t even know him. Yet you condemned her for his life…
as if his misfortune was written into her existence.
And because she didn’t come from the kind of world you imagined for Caleb. ”
“I told myself I was protecting Caleb from being used.” Her voice broke completely. “But somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing her as a person.”
Tears streamed down her face.
“I saw her as a threat and everything I didn’t want for my son.”
“She loved me,” I said hoarsely. “And I punished her for it.”
The room fell silent again.
Then suddenly, running footsteps thundered down the hallway.
The children burst into the dining room laughing breathlessly.
My mother wiped her tears quickly, trying to compose herself.
“We’re thirsty,” Adam said, his voice breathless. “We came in for a drink.”
“Are you guys watching a movie?” Malaika asked, pointing at the laptop screen.
“No, honey,” Simon replied gently. “The adults are talking right now. Why don’t you go to the kitchen and get a drink from there?”
Malaika leaned forward, squinting at the screen.
Then her face lit up.
“I know her!”
Every muscle in my body locked.
Simon frowned. “Sweetheart—”
“No, Daddy!” she insisted, pointing toward the screen. “That’s the lady from the hospital!”
The air seemed to vanish from the room.
“The lady who came to see me before surgery,” Malaika continued. “And the lady who saved Michelle and me in the forest.”
My heart slammed painfully against my ribs.
“It’s her,” Malaika said confidently. “Aunty Nyah.”
Memory crashed into me so violently that I staggered backward.
The hospital hallway.
Jiya asking about Malaika.
The white thank-you card sitting on her dresser.
The blood donor.
I turned slowly toward Simon.
“The card you bought for the blood donor…” My voice came out rough. “You remember it?”
He nodded.
“What did it look like?”
“It was white with gold lettering.”
The same card.
A dull roaring filled my ears.
While my mother hated her…
While I blamed her…
While I accused her of destroying my life…
Jiya had still chosen to save them anyway.
“Guys,” I said quietly to the children. “Please excuse us. We have something important to discuss.”
They nodded and wandered back out of the room.
I turned to my mother again.
“For someone who hated Jiya so much,” I said quietly, “there’s something you should know.”
Fear flickered across her face.
“While you and Malaika were waiting for blood at the hospital… fighting for your lives… and we were running around trying to arrange donors…” I paused, letting the weight of the moment settle. “Would you like to guess who saved yours?”
Her eyes widened.
“The woman you spent years destroying… the woman you said wasn’t right for this family or me… the woman you lied about and kept me away from …” My voice shook. “It’s Jiya’s blood running through your veins right now.”
I stepped closer to her, every nerve in my body vibrating with rage.
My mother’s face crumpled completely.
A broken sob escaped her.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered.
“No,” I replied bitterly. “You never cared enough to know.”
She collapsed slowly into the chair behind her, staring blankly at the table through tears.
“I never forgot what happened to her father,” she whispered weakly. “Not for a single day. I told myself I had made the right decision, but I knew what happened to him. I knew what it cost.”
I stared at her numbly, struggling to reconcile the woman standing in front of me with the mother I had known my entire life. The weight of everything she had admitted pressed down on my chest so heavily it felt difficult to breathe.
For a moment, nobody spoke. The room had fallen completely silent except for the uneven sound of her crying.
I couldn’t look at her anymore.
Turning away, I walked toward the door on unsteady legs. Behind me, I heard hurried footsteps and muffled voices calling my name, but the sounds barely registered through the chaos roaring inside my head.
Nothing felt real anymore.
Every truth I had believed in had shattered within the span of a few minutes. And as I walked out of the room, one thought settled painfully into my chest.
Nothing in my life would ever be the same again.