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I want to tell you that I fought. I refused to let you go. But this family is built on a legacy that didn’t include you, and I was not strong enough to break it.

Though you were not conceived out of love, I never stopped loving you. Believe that, even if you believe nothing else.

My stomach twists until I think I’ll be sick.

Your love is something I can’t ask for, as I don’t deserve it. But I hope for your forgiveness all the same, even knowing I will never receive it.

Then, at the end, like a dagger puncturing my ribs:

I love you, my son.

I stare until the letters blur.

Then I blink, but the words remain, solid as stone.

My mother had another son.

A brother I never knew existed.

The room closes in until I’m rolling my shoulders to get away. My breaths come too quickly, too shallow to fill my lungs.

I check the postmark with a sick, frantic need for confirmation. The letter came back the day before she jumped.

I force down a hard swallow, but it does nothing. The truth hooks into me. That was what did it. She reached for the son she had to give away, and he rejected her.

Not the loneliness. Not the slow collapse of whatever she’d been holding together for forty years.

That.

And then she left the rest of us behind, merely the family she had outgrown. Five sons who were stuck in that manor with her, bound to tradition. A husband who built the strength of his entire spine around her presence.

The paper crumples in my hand.

Fury divides itself between her secrecy, his existence, and my father’s silence. It’s humiliating that I’m sitting at a desk, reading my mother’s confession like a stranger who found her diary at an estate sale. And beneath all of it, one selfish question closes my throat anyway.

Why weren’t we enough?

Somewhere in Brightridge, a man I’ve never known has been living a life my mother once begged to touch.

I want to slice open my arm and pull out all the veins. I want to demolish this room with my bare hands.

She left us because of some fucking asshole who didn’t give a shit about her.

I slump back in the chair, chest heaving.

“Edwin?”

Zaiya’s soft voice pulls me away from the edge. I scrub at my eyes with my arm before I turn.

There’s my angel. Wrapped in a black robe that makes her look ghostly pale, damp hair spilling over her shoulders. Her eyes are still tired, but the emptiness is gone. A harder resolve has taken its place.

She looks at me as if she’s bracing for my anger. I do my best to steady myself, but I can’t stop the spike of adrenaline.

My trembling hand lifts the envelope. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it,” she says quietly, coming to stand beside me. “In a book from Vanessa’s hideout.”

“What book?”