All Chapters of Daddy by deception - My ex husband's fake heirs: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

It began with tone.Not open defiance. Not yet. Just a slight change in the way the boys answered him, as if the authority he had taken for granted in the house had thinned along with the money and they could already feel the difference.Caleb was first.Gregory came home on a Wednesday evening and found the older boy on the main stairs, school blazer half off, bag abandoned on the landing. The instruction was ordinary — pick up the bag, hang the blazer, stop leaving things where people walked. A month earlier Caleb would have obeyed with only mild complaint. This time he looked down at Gregory from the third step and said, “Why? Thomas can do it.”The casualness of it stopped Gregory mid-stride.“Because I told you to,” he said.Caleb’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “That’s not a reason.”“It is in this house.”The boy held his gaze a second longer than he should have, then moved slowly enough to make the compliance itself feel provisional. He picked up the bag. He did not hang

The words did not come in the middle of another shouting match. They came the next evening, in a quieter, more dangerous register.Gregory had tried, in the awkward way of a man who hated admitting fault, to repair the damage of Josiah’s outburst. He brought home a small wooden puzzle for the younger boy and a new game cartridge for Caleb. The gifts were not extravagant — he could not afford extravagant — but they were intentional. A white flag. A reminder that he still provided, still showed up, still occupied the center of the household.Caleb accepted the game with a muttered thanks and disappeared upstairs. Josiah took the puzzle, turned it over in his hands, and did not open it.Dorcas watched from the doorway of the lounge, Hope asleep against her shoulder, her expression unreadable.Gregory waited until the boys were alone with him in the rear room before he tried to speak.“About yesterday,” he began, standing near the window with his hands in his pockets. “I know things h

Doubt did not arrive as a single conviction. It arrived as a series of revisits.By the afternoon Gregory could no longer sit still in the study. He walked the mansion like a man inspecting a property after a storm, not for structural damage but for evidence of a different kind of failure. The framed studio photograph in the upstairs hallway stopped him first. The five of them, arranged under soft light, smiling with the ease of a family that belonged together. He had paid for that image. He had hung it where anyone walking toward the boys’ rooms would see it. Now, staring at Caleb’s grin and Josiah’s half-lean into his side, he could not decide whether he was looking at love or at a well-lit performance.He took the frame off the wall.In the lounge he stood over the basket of blocks Josiah had knocked over days earlier and felt the echo of the unfinished sentence — *You’re not even*— — rearrange itself into newer, uglier completions. Not even their father. Not even the point. Not

The change settled into his vision first.Gregory still moved through the same rooms, still heard the same voices, still occupied the head of the same table. But the people inside the house no longer arranged themselves under the old meanings. Every gesture invited inspection. Every inherited expression became evidence. He had become a man living inside a forensic exercise from which he could not clock out.At breakfast he watched Caleb’s hands.The long fingers. The way the boy held a spoon with a slight angle at the wrist. Gregory tried to remember whether those hands resembled his own and could not finish the comparison cleanly. They were a child’s hands. They could have come from anywhere. That was the problem — anywhere now included a workshop on the east side of the city and a man whose story voices Josiah preferred.“You’re staring,” Caleb said without looking up.“Eat your food.”“I am.”The older boy’s tone was flat, not openly rude, but stripped of the old effort to please.

Regret arrived without drama. It came as a quiet, permanent shift in the way Gregory occupied his own life.He woke on the study sofa before dawn, the blanket twisted around his legs, the taste of old sleep in his mouth. For a few seconds the room was only furniture and grey light. Then the previous days reassembled themselves — Josiah’s confession, Dorcas’s non-answers, the wooden animal on the shelf, the empty hook in the hallway — and the weight settled back onto his chest as if it had never left.He sat up slowly and put his feet on the floor.Regret was different from doubt. Doubt questioned what was true. Regret questioned what he had done with the years already spent. It moved backward through his decisions and found them smaller, more frightened, more selfish than the story he had told himself at the time.He had left Cathrene because the marriage felt empty. He had not asked carefully enough whether he had helped empty it.He had wanted children so badly that the first co