Without a single word, she adjusted the babies against her chest, picked up her bag, and kept walking down the road.
I watched until she disappeared around a curve. Then I drove away.
But not home.
For the next two hours, I sat alone in a diner parking lot, staring at nothing.
The twins would not leave my mind. Their hair. Their age. Their faces. The timing.
Every calculation brought me back to the same impossible question: Could they be mine?
By evening, I found myself parked outside the office of the private investigator I had hired during my divorce.
The same investigator who had uncovered the evidence against Maren.
I demanded the original files. The man hesitated, then reluctantly handed them over.
As I studied the documents, something caught my eye.
A trail of payment records. Large payments. Recent payments. All from the same source: Tessa Whitmore.
My blood turned cold.
I flipped through more pages. Then more.
And then, buried among dozens of reports, I found a signed statement that had never been placed in my final file.
A witness claimed the hotel photos had been staged. The necklace had been planted. And the person who had arranged the whole thing had personally paid for it.
Tessa.
My hands began to shake.
For almost a year, I had lived with the woman who had destroyed my marriage. For almost a year, I had been preparing to marry her.
But the final page was what truly stopped my heart.
Attached to the witness statement was a hospital record. The date matched the week after Maren left.
Twin birth certificates.
Father’s name: Rowan Bellamy.
And suddenly, I understood that the twins were not the largest secret Tessa had hidden from me.
Because at the bottom of the page was a handwritten note:
“If Rowan ever discovers the truth, make sure he never learns what happened to the third baby.”…
The words on that last page blurred in front of me. The third baby.
My breath caught in my chest, a crushing weight tightening around my lungs. Maren had not only given birth to twins. She had been pregnant with triplets.
I looked up at the investigator, my vision sharpened by a dangerous, quiet rage. I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him halfway across the desk. “Where is the third child?” I whispered, my voice shaking the air between us.
The man swallowed hard, his face as pale as paper. “I don’t know, Rowan! I swear! Tessa handles the medical staff at the clinic. She paid them to declare the third baby stillborn on the official records, but… but the witness statement says the child was healthy. Tessa took the baby.”
I released him, my mind spinning into a black abyss. Tessa had my child.
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