3: 3
In July, I got my college acceptance letter.
It had been my mother's dearest wish before she died. She never got to see it.
Mortimer was over the moon. He booked the largest private room at a five-star hotel and invited every relative and friend to celebrate.
Selina, of course, couldn't afford to slip in front of a crowd like that. Smiling, she handed me a jewelry box and opened it in front of everyone.
Inside lay a diamond necklace, glittering under the lights.
"Just a little something from your Aunt Selina."
She fastened it around my neck with her own hands, her voice sweet enough to make your teeth ache.
"Brenda is my own daughter now. Everything the Hensons have, she and Madge will split down the middle."
The relatives fell over themselves praising Selina's grace, and Mortimer nodded, well pleased.
I touched the necklace and thanked her, all smiles.
Once I got home, I took it off and studied it carefully under the light.
Crude cut, wrong refraction. Moissanite passing itself off as the real thing, worth two hundred dollars at most on the open market.
The genuine piece she'd claimed it was would run at least a hundred and sixty thousand.
I smiled.
Then I opened my laptop, logged in to a high-traffic jewelry appraisal forum, and posted under the name of a "concerned member of the public."
The title read: 【SHOCKING! The "diamond necklace" a certain company chairman's new wife gave her stepdaughter turns out to be FAKE? Nine high-res detail shots exposed!】
The post carried nine close-ups of the necklace, marking out every telltale sign of a fake, from the cut facets and fire to the setting work.
Beside each one I set a comparison shot of the real thing, so anyone could see it at a glance.
I didn't name a soul. But I "accidentally" caught the Henson living room's feature wall in the last photo, the framed family portrait on it perfectly clear.
The comments blew up within the hour.
"Isn't that the living room in Mortimer Henson's house, from Henson Group? I've seen it on the news before!"
"I'm dying. The stepmother handed over a fake in front of that many people? What an act."
"A hundred-and-sixty-thousand necklace swapped for a two-hundred-dollar fake, so where'd the difference go? The more you think about it, the creepier it gets."
"If I were her dad I'd have thrown the woman out on the spot. So humiliating."
I smiled. This was only the beginning.
For the better part of a year, Selina had tried every trick in the book to get pregnant.
She bought ovulation strips by the pile, timed every cycle to the day, and tagged along even on Mortimer's business trips, terrified of missing a single chance.
But her belly stayed flat.
She panicked. She went for tests in secret, more than once, and the fertility center's results all said the same thing: severe ovarian failure, the odds of natural conception next to nothing.
She tore the reports up and threw them in the trash.
The next day I made her another bowl of chicken soup, and she drank every last drop.
And after all those months of that soup,
there was no chance left of her ever conceiving.
Mortimer watched his pretty young wife fail to catch, and he was pushing fifty. Drag it out any longer and he could forget about a son in this lifetime.
His patience was wearing thinner by the day.
One night, I heard them fighting in the bedroom.
"Is it that you can't have children?"
Mortimer's voice was loud, clear as anything through the door.
"The doctor said there's nothing wrong with me!" Selina sobbed out her defense. "Maybe... maybe it's because you're getting older—"
She never finished. A loud, ringing slap.
"Say that again! Can I have kids or can't I?"
Selina clutched her face and cried harder, apologizing over and over, saying that wasn't what she meant.
Mortimer slammed the door and left.
I slipped into my room, locked the door, and laughed until my stomach hurt.
4: 4
On weekends, I chose to stay at the house.
One night, passing the study, I heard Selina inside, keeping her voice down on the phone.
"Next week... yeah, he's away on business. Come over that night." Her voice was low and hurried. "Don't drive that car of yours, it's too noticeable. Just this once. Do it and leave, understand?"
I stood outside the door and recorded the whole thing.
Then I slipped back to the end of the hall, as if I hadn't heard a thing.
The following Wednesday, Mortimer left on business, right on schedule.
Selina said she had a get-together with her girlfriends that night and told Madge and me to go out and enjoy ourselves.
I made plans with friends to check out a trendy new restaurant that had just opened.
Madge begged me to bring her along.
I happily agreed.
Then I had someone keep an eye on Madge, and I turned straight back to the villa.
At eleven that night, a gray Volkswagen pulled up at the villa's gate.
Selina got out and went inside together with the man in the driver's seat.
Neither of them turned on a light. They felt their way straight up to the second-floor guest room in the dark.
I followed behind them, my steps light as a cat's.
The moment the guest room door closed, I placed a video call to Mortimer.
"Dad, are you asleep?"
I kept my voice low, with a thread of nervousness in it.
On his end, Mortimer was still at a dinner, the background noisy.
"Not yet. Why are you still up so late?"
I spoke softly into the phone.
"I think someone's broken into the house."
"I heard noises coming from the guest room, really strange sounds... Dad, I'm a little scared."
Mortimer went tense all at once.
"Don't move. I'll send property security over!"
"It's fine, I'll just take a look. Maybe it's a stray cat."
I pointed the phone's camera at the guest room door and pushed it open.
On the screen, two bodies were tangled together.
Selina was on top of the man, her hair loose, her face lost in it.
And the man was none other than Nathan Lambert, the Henson family's private physician of ten years.
I let out a scream, and the phone "dropped" from my hand to the floor, but the camera landed facing up, at a perfect angle, the picture crystal clear.
On the other end, Mortimer was silent for a full five seconds.
Then came a roar I'd never heard from him before, like a beast.
I will never forget what that night looked like.
Mortimer tore back from out of town overnight, his face black as a pot bottom.
Selina knelt on the living room floor wrapped in a bedsheet, her knees bruised purple, her face a mess of tears and snot.
Nathan had bolted in the chaos, and Mortimer didn't chase him, probably deciding that dragging him back would only be more humiliating.
Selina clung to Mortimer's leg, her face pressed against his leather shoe.
"Mortimer, listen to me! He seduced me!"
"It was a moment of weakness! Give me one more chance!"
"A moment of weakness?" Mortimer kicked her off. "The way you were riding him just now didn't look like weakness to me!"
I huddled in the corner of the sofa with my face buried in my hands, my shoulders shaking, pretending to cry.
"Dad..." I said, my voice catching. "Don't be angry, your health comes first. You still have me. Aren't I your daughter?"
The words were like a needle straight into Selina's heart.
Her head snapped up and she glared at me, her eyes bloodshot, her voice shrill as a nail scraping a blackboard.
"It's you! You set this up to ruin me!"
I cried harder.
"Aunt Selina, what are you talking about? I don't know anything... I just heard the noises and got scared, so I called Dad..."
