I stood up slowly, the baby monitor in my purse buzzing faintly like it knew something was wrong.
“You’re telling me my husband and my brother spent years lying to me about my own child? While I was raising her alone?”
Bruce reached for my hand.
I pulled away.
“Stay away from me,” I said, voice shaking for the first time in twenty years. “Both of you. I need to think.”
Elena didn’t follow me out. She just watched me walk back to the resort like a woman who had just been handed the entire truth about the family she thought she knew.
I opened my phone with trembling fingers and called the only person I trusted more than anyone else in the world.
“Mom,” I said, voice cracking, “I need you to send me the address of that storage unit. And I need you to tell me the truth about something I’m about to find.”
Behind me, I heard Bruce whisper my name like a prayer he had never been allowed to say.
“Claire…”
But the only answer I gave him was the one he didn’t deserve.
“I’m done trusting anyone in this family.”
I walked back to our villa alone, the folder burning a hole in my hands, the four-year-old girl sleeping inside my heart waiting for the mother who was finally ready to tell her the truth she had been hiding for years.
