I stared at the floor. I'd spent years wondering if he loved me. If I'd done something wrong. Turns out, I was just a reminder of everything he hated. A mistake he couldn't completely walk away from. The monthly checks suddenly made sense. They weren’t love, but obligation. Hush money. The price of his freedom.
"I lied to protect you," she said, her voice breaking. "I didn't want you to know how cruel he could be."
I nodded, but I couldn't speak. My throat was too tight. My chest too full of broken glass. Every memory of him was being rewritten in real time—his rare smiles, his distracted hugs, the way he'd check his watch when he thought I wasn't looking. He wasn't a busy man with important work. He was a man counting the minutes until he could leave.
She turned back to Grayson. "I knew he had other kids. I just hoped he wasn't as awful to them."
I glanced at him, already knowing the truth from Jackson.
Grayson's jaw tightened. "He wasn't terrible to me. But Meredith... he blamed her for our mother's death."
My breath caught. That kind of blame, it could rot a person from the inside out. To carry that weight as a child, to believe you were responsible for something so devastating... I couldn't imagine. For the first time, I felt something other than envy when I thought of Meredith. I felt a strange, unexpected kinship.
Anna's face crumpled. "I'm so sorry."
Grayson shook his head. "It wasn't your fault. Or hers. Our mom had postpartum depression. She took her own life. He ignored her cries for help."
The silence that followed was heavy. Sacred. A shared grief none of us could fix. I looked at my mother—so frail now, but still fighting—and wondered what would have happened ifAnthony had stayed. If he'd been the man she thought he was at first. Would he have ignored her illness too? Would she have suffered the same fate as Grayson's mother?
"I wish I could undo it," Anna said softly, her voice thick with regret.
"You did what you had to do," Grayson replied. "You protected your daughter. That's more than he ever did."
My chest ached. I wanted to reach for her hand, but I couldn't move. I was frozen between gratitude and grief, between the mother who'd sacrificed everything for me and the father who'd seen me as nothing but an inconvenience. Between the life I'd lived and the one I might have had if he'd been different. Better.
Anna nodded slowly. "I saw the newspaper clipping. The accident."
I looked at Jackson. He looked back.
We both knew the truth.
But I said nothing.
Not yet.
The weight of what I knew, what I'd learned, sat heavy in my stomach. The truth that Grayson and Leo had killed him. That they'd covered it up.
This man had killed my father. This handsome, polite man with the designer clothes and a charming smile had taken Anthony Cassaro's life. Looking at him now, you'd never suspect he was capable of murder.
Then again, I'd never thought I was until push came to shove.
I should have felt vindicated. Here was my proof—my father was a monster. The sibling who'd killed him had every reason. But instead, I felt hollow. Empty. Like I'd been fighting a war against ghosts.
"He wasn't a good man," Grayson said quietly, his eyes never leaving my mother's face. "But I'm sorry for what he did to you. To both of you."
There was something in his voice, a sincerity that cut through me. He was just a man who'd protected his sister from a monster. The same monster who'd tried to make my mother get rid of me.
"Did he ever..." Mom started, then stopped, her voice faltering. "Did he ever mention us?"
Even now, after everything, some part of her needed to know she'd mattered. That we'd mattered.
Grayson's expression softened. "No, I'm sorry."
My mother's face fell, but I could've sworn there was a strange relief there, like she'd gotten some answer for a question that had bothered her for too long.
I didn't know what to do with that information personally. That we were nothing to him ultimately. Something he'd thrown money at to make go away.
"I should have looked for you," Grayson said. "After he died. I knew he had... arrangements. Other women. But I never thought?—"
