Chapter 82 The Wife—Tara
The Wife—Tara
It does my heart good to see Chase suffering.
I act like the devoted wife, sitting by his side at the defense attorney’s office as he professes his innocence.
He keeps claiming he has no idea how that backpack got into his office, or where the phone with all the incriminating messages came from.
He swears all he did was answer Scarlett’s initial email when she first got the DNA report, and the next time he had contact with her was when he got an email from her asking to meet him at the coffee shop.
Of course, he doesn’t know that the email asking him to meet her was really from me posing as Scarlett.
It’s so easy to make a Gmail account in anyone’s name.
I nodded along, holding his hand, telling him I believed him and would stick by him through this terrible ordeal. Because of course, I do believe him. I know he’s innocent. Well, innocent of the charges against him. But not innocent of betraying me and our family.
Ever since Chase almost left me all those years ago, I regularly monitor his emails and his texts.
He uses the same tired code: Lucas’s birthday month and day.
So, when I saw the email that Scarlett had sent him saying she was a DNA match, I started digging.
This time it was worse than I feared. Not only was Chase sidling up to another woman, but the idiot had gone and done a DNA test on our son.
If he hadn’t done that, Scarlett would never have known she had a brother.
But Chase ticked the box allowing contact from any matches.
It didn’t take me long to dig through all his research into the hospital and see what he had discovered—the babies had been switched.
Why hadn’t he come to me first? I knew he must have been devastated.
The way he fusses over Lucas, constantly considering him before anything else, makes me sick.
The two of them, peas in a pod, so happy together; they’re always laughing at the same jokes, sharing the same taste in food and sports.
I always felt like a third wheel. It’s why I never wanted kids.
I was supposed to be the most important person in Chase’s life, the sun around which he orbits.
I couldn’t tell him that though. A child was the carrot I used to get Chase from the beginning.
I faked my pregnancy right before college graduation, when I could tell he was getting ready to break up with me.
I knew he’d never leave his child—not the way his father had left him.
It wasn’t hard to pretend to have morning sickness, to buy a fake bump, and then to have that devastating miscarriage at five months.
I acted like I hated my body getting bigger and couldn’t bear for him to see me naked, so it was easy to fool him.
He was so sympathetic afterward, worried about my well-being and happiness—as he should have been.
But then he wanted to try again, and I had to pretend to be sad each month when I got my period even though I was on the pill.
He wanted to see a fertility specialist, so I had to pretend to be pregnant again.
After so many “miscarriages,” he didn’t dare ask me to try again.
The only reason I finally got pregnant for real was because he was ready to leave me for another woman. And now he’s jeopardized everything.
After I found the paperwork Chase was hiding that showed that Lucas was not our biological son, I pretended that I had no idea about the switch.
That I was just as devastated by the truth, after everything came out when he was arrested.
I confronted him about why he did the test in the first place, and I was dumbfounded by his answer.
“I thought you had cheated on me. That you’d gotten pregnant by someone else,” he said.
“That’s a laugh! You’re the one with the wandering eye. Why would you think I cheated?”
He told me about Lucas’s blood type not matching ours. “I checked the box to be contacted by any genetic matches, because I wanted to know who his father was. But then it came back with a maternal match, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t related to either of us.”
“Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone?” I screamed at him.
“I would have. But then Scarlett contacted me. I stalled, told her I needed time to think. She thought she was emailing Lucas. So I did some research. I asked someone good at hacking computers to see who else was at the hospital that night. And that’s when I realized what had happened.”
My blood is boiling. He’s so stupid. “You should have just ignored her. She would have had no way to find you. And it doesn’t matter that Lucas isn’t ours biologically. He’s old enough that the courts would never have taken him from us.”
“But it’s not right! All I could think about was how I’d feel if I’d been the one to have my child taken.
His mother has a right to know. I had to see what she was like, if she was a good person.
If she wasn’t, then maybe I would have ignored Scarlett, left well enough alone.
But Annabelle is a good person. I couldn’t allow her to keep thinking her son was dead.
And we owe the truth to Lucas too. He has siblings.
When I got an email from Scarlett asking me to meet her, I was going there to ask her to give me time to tell Annabelle the truth, but then she ran from the coffee shop. I didn’t hit her. I swear.”
“Well, someone did. And they have a lot of evidence against you.”
“You have to believe me, Tara. I didn’t do it.”
“Don’t lie to me, Chase. You thought you and Annabelle would ride off into the sunset with my son? Make a new little family of your own?”
“No. I was just—”
“Save it. Doesn’t matter now. But why did you have to hurt that poor girl?
” I asked, relishing his pain, when I was the one who’d done it all along.
The phone, the backpack. It was all me. I lured him to the coffee shop that day using the fake Gmail account in her name.
Chase had never been texting that brat. I had been.
Using a phone purchased with his credit card.
I texted Scarlett and asked her to meet me there.
I thought she would at least talk to him, listen to what he had to say.
I was always planning to hit her and frame him.
I was surprised that she came out so quickly.
I followed her in the rental car. It was easy to hit her, grab the backpack, and drive off.
Later that night, I damaged Chase’s front bumper; I’d lied and said I was low on gas and borrowed it to go to the grocery store.
I pretended someone had hit me in the parking lot.
I promised to get repair estimates and work with the “woman” to have it fixed.
Then I had everything I needed to teach my treacherous husband a lesson.
Chase had nothing to do with it. But no one will believe him; I made sure of that.
And if that bitch, Annabelle, thinks she’s ever going to see Lucas, she’s sadly mistaken.
I told Lucas that Annabelle had switched the babies because she never wanted him.
That she had always wanted girls. It’s a preposterous lie, but it’s amazing what a vulnerable sixteen-year-old will believe.
He probably will need therapy now. I was lying when I told Annabelle that he was seeing someone for anxiety.
He’s been a happy kid all his life. But I guess that will change.
Now that his whole world has fallen apart.
I have to make sure they never meet, that he sees Annabelle as the enemy.
By the time I’m done, he’ll have to depend on me even more.
I can’t lose him. I’ll never lose him now.
With Chase in prison, it will just be the two of us.
I’ll no longer be the outsider looking in.
I should have never shown Annabelle my hand about leaving the country.
There’s no time now. We need to go. I’ll gather up the passports, pull out the suitcases, and begin packing.
Our flight leaves in two days, and then she’ll never find us.