Page 139 of What Goes Around

I didn’t give her that satisfaction.

When Marissa commented on how “lonely” my life must be, I mentioned my internship offers and upcoming travel plans.

“When I was your age,” Marissa said pointedly, “I understood the importance of family obligations.”

I nodded once. “When you were my age, you were a secretary sleeping with a married man. We all start somewhere.”

Apple choked on her drink.

My father didn’t rush to silence me. He stiffened, jaw tightening, eyes fixed on his plate, but he didn’t tell me to apologize. He didn’t tell me to watch my tone.

Marissa flushed, the red creeping up her neck. “That’s inappropriate.”

I shrugged lightly. “So was stealing from a child.”

In the months that followed, I visited my father about four times a year. Always at the house. Just to irritate Marissa and Apple. Every meeting was a performance. I pretended I was healing. That forgiveness might be possible. That I wanted a relationship.

In reality, I was disgusted.

Every meeting took restraint. Every conversation required me to swallow the urge to say everything I thought. I needed him functional. Remorseful. Trying.

Then, in my third year, Amy called me with news that blindsided me.

My father had a child with the current secretary.

A son. My half-brother.

He must have been around two years old when I was kidnapped in my past life.

In my last life, I never found out about him.

I sat with that information for a long time.

It explained a lot about that time period.

His absence. His distraction. How easily he let the world turn against me when I needed him most. While I was being vilified, broken, and blamed, he had been busy building a replacement. An heir. A son.

After the birth, he reached out less. Not intentionally, perhaps. But noticeably. Less urgency. Less desperation. His attention had shifted.

Over the years, I also learned how to play quieter games.

I sent Marissa anonymous hints about my father’s affair. Nothing overt. Nothing that could be traced back to me. Just enough to make a reasonable woman pause. The kind of breadcrumbs she herself had once scattered for my mother.

Nothing happened.

Marissa chose blindness. She pretended everything was fine, and as far as I knew, she never confronted him. Maybe she was afraid of being discarded. Afraid of losing her place, her comfort, her access to everything she’d clawed her way into. So she smiled, hosted dinners, played the devoted wife, and swallowed humiliation.

I never mentioned the child in those hints. The boy was innocent. He did not belong in the wreckage of adults who should have known better.

Still, something Marissa had said after the graduation party kept circling my mind like a splinter I couldn’t dig out.

„He was mine first.“

It didn’t sit right.

So I asked Amy to dig.

It didn’t take long.