Part 2The Secret Son at Our Door

Now that the truth was out, all Robert could do was apologize and explain. His excuse was pathetic, boiling down to a single, tired cliché: a drunken one-night stand in his youth.

It was laughable. Robert was famous for being able to hold his liquor when he was young. And even if he had gotten drunk, was he even capable of… performing?

After more than thirty years together, this man with his salt-and-pepper hair felt like a complete stranger.

I looked from him to the young man and asked my first question since Leo walked in. “Why didn’t your mother come with you?”

Leo’s lips twitched in a smirk, a look that said, I knew you’d ask that. “Julia, my mom’s a very busy woman. She’s on a trip with some friends right now. She didn’t have the time.”

I narrowed my eyes, studying the young man who shared a faint resemblance to Robert. I had a few decades of life experience on him; I wasn't deaf to the barbs hidden in his words. He held his chin slightly raised, an unconscious air of arrogance about him.

Just a secret son, and he thought he had the upper hand with me?

A cold laugh escaped me. “So, your mother raised you for all these years without looking for a father, but now she sends you? Did she finally run out of money to support you?”

Leo’s face darkened. Before he could speak, Robert barked from the side, “Julia!”

I shot him a frigid glare. He still couldn’t meet my eyes, only muttering that I shouldn’t take my anger out on the boy, that the boy was innocent and didn’t know anything.

Was the boy innocent?

Of course not. As a child born of an affair, his very existence was a sin against our marriage.

Leo didn’t stay long. His visit was meant to deliver a single message: he had a girlfriend he wanted to marry, but his current apartment was too small. He wanted to move in with us.

After all, our home was a sprawling three-thousand-square-foot condo.

What a ridiculous fantasy. I hadn’t worked my entire life just to hand it all over to someone else.

I immediately refused. Robert just lowered his head and said nothing.

As Leo left, he gave me a look that was half-smile, half-sneer. Robert had already done a DNA test. Even as a love child, his right to inheritance was set in stone.

I could block him for now, but I couldn’t block him forever.