All Chapters of I Married My Mother's Secret Lover : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The lights went out.For a moment, the entire house disappeared into darkness.I heard Adrian move before I felt his hand find mine.“Don't move.”His voice was low, controlled, but I could hear the strain beneath it.Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked.Then another.The man was still there.I tightened my fingers around Adrian's.“Who is he?”Adrian didn't answer.“Adrian.”“Not now.”“No. Now.”My voice came out louder than I intended, and the darkness seemed to swallow it.“I am done being the last person to know what is happening to my own life.”Adrian's hand tightened around mine.“I know.”“Then tell me.”Before he could answer, something crashed upstairs.Reed shouted from the hallway.“Adrian!”A second later, a shadow moved across the staircase.Adrian pushed me behind him.“Stay with Clara.”“No.”“Evelyn—”“I said no.”He turned toward me, frustration flashing across his face.“You don't understand what we're dealing with.”“Then make me understand.”For a moment, we

“I can explain.”Adrian’s words settled between us, but for once, they did not make me feel safer. They made me want to run.I looked down at the photograph in my hands again, at Daniel Hart standing beside my father, then at the message written across the back in dark, deliberate letters.NOW ASK YOUR HUSBAND WHY HE WAS THE LAST PERSON YOUR UNCLE CALLED.My fingers tightened around the photograph until the paper bent.“When did Daniel call you?”Adrian didn’t answer.I lifted my eyes to him. “I asked you a question.”His gaze remained fixed on mine.“The night before he disappeared.”Something inside me went painfully still.“And why didn’t you tell me?”“Because I didn’t know if the call was really from Daniel.”“But you knew someone using his name had called you.”“Yes.”I laughed once, but there was nothing amused about it. “Incredible.”Adrian stepped toward me. “Evelyn, listen to me.”I stepped back.He stopped immediately.That hurt more than I expected, because some part of me

The moment Adrian told me Victoria had brought Daniel to Blackwood, every other thought disappeared. My mother had known where my uncle was. She had known while we were standing at the lake, while she looked into my eyes and told me I was asking the wrong questions. She had known while Adrian, Gabriel, Clara, and I searched for answers she had apparently been carrying for years. And now Daniel was inside my husband’s house. Alive. I turned toward Adrian. “Take me to him.” His expression hardened. “Evelyn, we don't know why Victoria brought him here.” “That's exactly why I need to see him.” “It could be a trap.” “Everything has been a trap.” I stepped closer, lowering my voice. “But if Daniel is really my uncle, I am done letting everyone else decide what I am allowed to know about my own family.” For a moment, Adrian simply looked at me. Then he reached for my hand, his fingers closing around mine, warm and firm. “Then we go together.” The tenderness of the gesture almost

I found Daniel outside the medical room, gripping the doorframe so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. He didn't go inside. He simply stood there, staring through the narrow glass panel as if he were afraid that one wrong movement would make the woman on the bed disappear again. I stopped beside him. "Daniel." He didn't look at me. "She's twenty-four." I frowned. "What?" "My daughter. She's twenty-four." My breath caught. Twenty-four. My age. Daniel finally turned toward me, and the pain in his eyes was almost unbearable. "Her name is Amelia." I looked through the glass. A young woman lay unconscious on the bed while a nurse checked her pulse and Reed stood nearby. Her dark hair was spread across the pillow, and there was a small bruise near her temple. She looked peaceful, almost unnaturally so for someone who had just been pulled out of sixteen years of secrets. "Why did you hide her?" Daniel swallowed. "Because the moment Marcus learned she existed, she became a wea

I read my father's words again, trying to understand how a sentence so simple could make everything I believed about my childhood feel uncertain. They changed what you remembered. The words seemed to pulse beneath my fingertips as I stood in the hidden room, surrounded by photographs of myself taken over the course of sixteen years. For most of my life, I had believed my childhood memories were simply broken pieces of a traumatic night, fragments of fear and confusion that time had failed to put back together. I had convinced myself that the lake, the red boat, my mother's voice, and Adrian pulling me from the water were all that remained because I had been too young to understand what happened. But Lucas had known that something was wrong. My father had known someone had done something to my memories, and he had left these words for me because he had expected that one day I would find them. I turned slowly toward Adrian, who had been watching me with an expression I couldn't quite re