Chapter 3 - What the Letter ProvedWhen Carrie walked in holding Milo's hand that evening, my mother stood up so fast her chair scraped hard against the floor. Jasper stared at Milo like he was watching his own reflection suddenly move on its own.
Gareth came back in from the hallway, spotted Carrie standing there, and went entirely white. Then he said, almost calmly, "She's here to start trouble."
Carrie placed the forged letter down on the table. I placed the hospital records beside it. Marjorie set copies of the bank transfers down next to those.
Jasper looked at me, then at Milo, then finally at Gareth. "Is he actually my brother?" he asked plainly.
Nobody answered him fast enough. Milo's hand tightened hard around Carrie's. My mother started crying before she'd even heard the full story properly. My father kept reading through the letter, as though the paper itself might somehow change if he simply stared hard enough at it.
Gareth told the boys to sit down and stop listening entirely. That was precisely when I finally heard, clearly, how often he'd mistaken issuing commands for actually telling the truth.
My father picked up the letter, turned it over in his hands, and frowned deeply. "This paper came from the same stationery Gareth used to keep in his old office."
Nobody said a single word.
My mother looked at Carrie first. "I'm so sorry," she said. "He told us you wanted nothing whatsoever to do with this family, and I genuinely believed him."
Then she turned to face me directly. "We will support both boys, and both of you, no matter what Gareth actually wants going forward."
Gareth tried talking over her. He said he'd only ever been protecting me. He said Carrie loved Milo regardless of the circumstances. He said the whole arrangement had genuinely worked out fine. Carrie looked straight at him. "You stole a child," she said flatly, "and simply called it help."
That was the exact moment he finally lost the entire room.
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My father removed him from the business project he'd been hoping to join that same year. His own parents refused outright to fund the legal fight he started threatening the very next day. Once the papers sat plainly on the table, he could no longer control the narrative at all.
By the end of that week, everyone in the family knew some version of what he'd actually done. Family friends who used to praise his steadiness stopped calling entirely. The story traveled steadily through cousins, neighbors, and business partners, in that ugly, efficient way family scandals always seem to spread. He hated that part most of all, honestly. Not the actual loss itself. The witnesses to it.
