Chapter 420: Contradictory Truths

Delilah, curled on the sectional with her knees drawn up, lifted her head just enough to look at her mother.

The girl’s eyes were red-rimmed — not from crying. Delilah hadn’t cried for her lost twin and the whole truth since the night Phei carried them out of the Maxton Estate.

The tears had been spent, or stored, or frozen, or something. What remained was the sheer,

grinding exhaustion

of a mind trying to hold

contradictory truths

in the same skull without splitting apart.

Melissa set the spatula down with deliberate care, as though sudden movement might shatter something fragile — not the spatula, not the pan, but the filament-thin thread of conversation that had just begun to

unspool

between mother and daughter.

She turned in Phei’s arms until she could face both him and Delilah, back braced against the island edge, robe slipping further to expose the curve of her breast and the bite mark that still bloomed dark against her skin.

"I never even looked at the ultrasound myself," she said quietly. "Not once after the fisrt scan that should’ve been a confirmation. Harold always went with me from there on. Every appointment. Every scan. He chose the hospital — some private Maxton-affiliated clinic up in the north hills. Said it was the best care money could buy. Said he wanted to be there for every moment."

She gave a bitter little laugh that had no humour in it — the laugh of a woman who’d spent eighteen years replaying the same scenes and finding new horror in each one.

"I thought it was love.

Devotion.

I let him hold the printouts. I let him read the reports aloud to me while I rested.

’Healthy boy and girl,’

he’d say.

’Our perfect twins.’

And the doctors... they were always so quick. Too quick. Whenever I asked to see the screen myself, they’d move the wand faster, angle it away, start talking about heartbeats and measurements. I told myself they were just busy. Professional. I told myself I was being paranoid."

She closed her eyes for a long moment. The kitchen was very quiet. Even the butter had stopped sizzling, as if the stove was listening — or mourning.

"

Everything was staged

. Every single thing. The ultrasounds. The gender reveal. The birth records. The nurses who smiled too brightly and left the room too fast. I didn’t question it because I trusted him so badly to believe we were building something real."

Delilah’s voice came out small. Almost childlike. "How did he even do it?" she asked, barely above a whisper. "If you knew you were having two girls—"

"I did know," Melissa cut in, eyes opening again. They were wet now, but the tears weren’t falling. Not yet— hadn’t given herself permission to break completely in front of the daughter she’d failed for eighteen years.

"I knew.

The first scan

— the one

Harold

wasn’t there for, because he had a

’meeting’

— showed

two girls

. Two little profiles on the screen. Two heartbeats. I cried in the exam room. Happy tears. Real ones. I called him right after, told him everything. He said he was thrilled. Said he’d be there for the next one."

Her hands found the edge of the island counter and gripped it. White knuckles against cool quartz. The kind of grip that said

if I let go I might fall apart completely

.

"

And when the next one came...

" Her voice cracked — just once, just a hairline fracture in the armour she’d worn for almost two decades.

"

Suddenly

it was

a boy and a girl

. Different clinic. Different doctor. Same husband telling me to relax, telling me the

first scan must have been wrong

, with a doctor who had ten reasons why the first one was a lie or a

mistake

and

evidence

of such thigs happening all the time, telling me it happened all the time.

’Early scans are unreliable,’

Harold had added.

’Trust the professionals.’

"And I believed it. I believed

him

. Because despite the fact that the first scan said otherwise, I was still having my twins, and I was so happier this because... I was having a

boy and a girl

. They were my children, Phei, why wouldn’t I be happy?!"

Phei’s arms tightened fractionally around her waist — not possessive, not demanding, just present.

A silent anchor.

The steady pressure of a body that was saying

I’m here, keep going, I’m not leaving

, even as his own blood hummed with the same cold rage that had torn the sky open four nights ago.

Melissa’s voice dropped lower, almost confessional.

"How did it all happen? I still don’t know. Not fully. How do you

swap an infant

in a Legacy hospital? How do you forge records across three different systems? How do you convince an entire medical staff to lie for eighteen years?"

She swallowed hard, the sound audible in the sudden hush of the kitchen. "And Danton... he’s

Harold

’s. There’s no question. The eyes. The jaw. The way he smirks when he thinks no one’s watching — that’s

Harold

’s smirk, carbon-copied onto a younger face. He’s

Harold

’s blood, not some unkown child of mother they might’ve paid for her boy.

NOPE.

I checked both their DNAs.

"

So where did the other baby come from?

Did

Harold

have a mistress pregnant at the same time? Did he plan it years in advance? Was there a surrogate? A black-market adoption? A kidnapping? It does

not

make sense how we all had the kids at the same time for a convenient swap even if he had a pregnant mistress waiting on the side."

Her hands clenched harder. The quartz was cold under her palms. The kitchen was warm with cinnamon and butter and morning light and none of it reached her.

None of it could touch the ice that had lived in her chest.

"I started asking questions a year

before my brother died

. Quiet ones. Discreet ones. He helped me... he’s the one that had found out the truth.

We dug. We found inconsistencies

— dates that didn’t match, nurses who’d left the country suddenly, sealed files that couldn’t be unsealed without

Maxton Legacy council

approval. But we never found

the how

. Or

the why

. And then my brother was gone."

The sentence landed in the kitchen like a body hitting a floor — heavy, final, echoing.

"’Accident,’

they said."

She paused. The word sat there, wearing quotation marks like a disguise everyone could see through, but no one dared to rip off.

"I stopped asking. I told myself I was paranoid. I told myself I had three beautiful children who loved me, digging deeper would only put them in danger and the boy I had just ben told to look after without babysitting."

She laughed again — a broken, hollow thing. A sound that had been a laugh once and was now just the shape of one, emptied of everything that made laughter warm.

It was the laugh of a woman who’d spent years replaying the same scenes and finding new horror in each one and one of then gad taken her brother, until

horror

became the only familiar thing left.

"Any mother would choose silence and safety for the three daughter who now had a life and do anything in her power to protect them, to protect that innocence and her nephew."

Delilah

unfolded slowly from the sectional, walking toward the kitchen island like she was moving through deep water.

Each step deliberate. Each step costing something — a piece of the armour she’d worn since childhood, a fragment of the girl who’d believed her father loved her.

She stopped on the other side of the counter, palms flat against the cool quartz, mirroring her mother’s grip on the opposite edge.

Two women. Same counter. Same white knuckles. Same blood.

"You knew,"

she whispered. Not an accusation. Just a statement. A wound finally being named so it could be cleaned — or at least acknowledged before it festered any deeper. "You knew something was wrong. And you stayed."

Melissa

met her daughter’s eyes without flinching.

"I stayed because I was terrified. Terrified that if I was right, if I pushed too hard, he’d take you girls away from me and do something to Phei. Or

worse."