Chapter 12 - THE FAMILY NAME
Richard sat down.
Ethan didn’t move at all.
Lauren stared at David.
Then she laughed once.
It wasn’t amusement.
It was disbelief.
“You’re saying my father was Richard’s brother?”
“Half brother.”
“No.”
Richard looked toward Samuel.
“Tell me he’s lying.”
Samuel’s silence answered.
Richard’s face collapsed.
“You knew?”
“Our mother found letters after Dad died.”
“Seventeen years ago?”
“Yes.”
“And you never told me?”
“She begged me not to.”
Richard stood.
“Our mother has been dead twelve years!”
Samuel looked ashamed.
“I kept waiting for the right time.”
Richard slammed his palm onto the table.
“There was no right time because you wanted there to be no time!”
Ethan stepped away from Lauren.
His expression had gone pale.
Lauren noticed.
“What?”
He looked sick.
“If Thomas was my grandfather’s son…”
Richard understood first.
“Ethan and Lauren are related.”
The room went dead silent.
Lauren looked at him.
“How closely?”
Detective Santos answered carefully.
“If the claimed relationship is accurate, Richard and Thomas were half brothers. Ethan is Richard’s son. Lauren is Thomas’s daughter.”
Lauren closed her eyes.
“They’re first cousins.”
Ethan sat down.
I felt as if the floor had disappeared.
The wedding.
The church.
The engagement.
Lauren hiding me.
None of it mattered anymore.
She and Ethan had unknowingly planned to marry a close relative.
Lauren started crying.
Ethan reached toward her, then stopped.
That tiny movement broke my heart.
Detective Santos held up a hand.
“Do not assume anything yet.”
Everyone turned.
“This claim is based on family letters none of us have seen.”
Samuel nodded.
“I have them.”
“Where?”
“At my house.”
Richard glared at him.
“You have hidden an entire family history in your house?”
Samuel whispered:
“Yes.”
Within an hour, his assistant delivered a locked document case.
Inside were letters between Edward Cole and a woman named Helen Miller.
Thomas’s mother.
My former mother-in-law.
I recognized her handwriting.
One letter from Edward read:
I will provide for the boy, but Richard and Samuel must never know.
Lauren sat silently beside me as Detective Santos examined the dates.
Then she stopped.
“This doesn’t fit.”
“What?” Richard asked.
She pointed to Thomas’s birth date.
Then to a letter.
“This letter was written eleven months before Thomas was born.”
Samuel frowned.
“So?”
Santos slid it across the table.
Edward had written:
I am sorry about your husband. Thomas will need a father now.
Lauren looked up.
“If Thomas wasn’t born yet, how could Edward already call him Thomas?”
No one answered.
The detective reached for another envelope.
Something small fell out.
A photograph.
Helen Miller stood beside Edward.
Between them was a four-year-old boy.
On the back, someone had written:
Edward, Helen, and Thomas - 1965.
Richard whispered:
“That’s impossible.”
May you like
It was.
Because according to every official record, Thomas Miller had been born in 1969.
