The Marriage K.L. Slater (classic romance novels TXT) 📖

each other. They both knew only too well that this side of Robert existed even though he didn’t show it to the world.

‘Dad told her he wouldn’t see her for counselling and the lifts home were done. He completely cut her off. Then Jesse died and Bridget immediately became territorial about the baby, promised Coral she’d look after both her and the baby. So Coral said nothing to me or to Bridget and decided instead to pass the baby off as Jesse’s.’

Jill frowned, the cogs turning in her head as she struggled to process the awful facts. ‘So, Jesse never knew about Robert?’

‘That’s the thing. On the morning of the day Jesse died, Coral found texts on Jesse’s phone. He’d been secretly seeing another girl. They had a terrible argument and Coral lost her temper, threw the truth of what she’d done with Dad at him to hurt him. That’s why Jesse wanted us to go out that night. To tell me about Dad and Coral.’

Jill shook her head, unable to comprehend it. ‘She actually told Jesse that Robert was the baby’s father?’

‘Yep. Even though she wasn’t a hundred per cent sure, she said it in the heat of the argument. Jesse was excited about the baby and she wanted to really hurt him after finding out he’d been unfaithful.’

‘She didn’t have DNA proof back then?’

Tom shook his head. ‘That didn’t happen until years later. When Jesse died she was terrified of the truth coming out and Bridget disowning her and the baby. But needing to know the truth tortured her and when Ellis was five, she had his DNA analysed. The result in itself didn’t mean anything, but she kept it for a reason.’

Jill frowned. ‘She was waiting until you got out of prison.’

Tom nodded. ‘She never saw Dad again and she didn’t want anything to do with him, either. She had Bridget to help her financially. But as Ellis got older, Bridget became more and more controlling, and Coral got to the stage where she wanted out.’

‘Bridget truly believed Ellis was Jesse’s son and she was his blood grandparent,’ Jill whispered, and Tom saw the realisation dawning on her face that she wasn’t the only person who’d been terribly betrayed. ‘And why wouldn’t she?’

‘Jesse told Coral that day he was going to tell me what Dad had done and he was going to punish Robert, ruin him. Coral never got a chance to speak to me before I was arrested for Jesse’s manslaughter. But when Ellis was five, she wrote to me in prison and said that if I had a DNA test done too when I got out of prison, it would prove we had the same father and I was Ellis’s half-brother. It would be her passport to getting rid of Bridget. But there was another consideration. She didn’t want to let her nice life go, the life Bridget supported. So, together with Audrey, who she’d befriended at the shop, she came up with a plan. She realised that once she had the DNA evidence that Ellis was Robert’s son, she had the ability to make Dad pay – literally.’

His mother frowned. ‘Pay maintenance for Ellis, you mean?’

Tom laughed sadly. ‘Oh, she wanted a lot more than that. Between them, she and Audrey cooked up a plan to blackmail Dad. Maintenance payments would be peanuts, but if Dad was faced with losing his marriage, his job, his standing in the local community, he might be persuaded to sell the house and pay her a good lump sum for her silence.’

Jill’s mouth fell open. ‘He asked me to sign something … I didn’t read it. Something to do with the mortgage.’

Tom shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about that now, Mum. We’ll have to sort everything out. The first thing is to get the truth out there.’

‘Audrey knew, you knew,’ Jill said in a small voice. ‘The people I loved the most.’

‘I had to make a decision in prison. If I’d told you on one of your visits it would have nearly killed you, sitting there in that awful visitors’ hall. You were so low, so desperate for us to be a family again. You, me and Dad. It was an easy decision for me, it had to wait until I was released.’

‘And Bridget?’

‘I’m going to speak to Bridget when I leave here,’ he said with a weary sigh.

‘Hang on a minute.’ Jill raised a finger as a thought occurred to her. ‘You married Bridget knowing that Ellis was probably your half-brother.’

‘Yes,’ Tom said quietly.

‘Did you marry her so you’d be close to him?’

He felt sad to see the hope in his mother’s eyes. Hope that he’d reveal he didn’t have feelings for Bridget after all.

‘No, Mum. I married Brid because I love her. But I’d been desperate to keep on good terms with her because of Ellis. I wrote so many letters during that first year. In one of them, at my lowest point, I told her the truth about Dad being Ellis’s father. But she destroyed that letter and all the others without reading them. So the truth never came to light. Then when we did the restorative justice programme together, we got closer and I fell in love with her. I married her for the right reasons.’

‘I see,’ Jill said softly. Then, ‘I’m glad about that. I’d hate to think you’d been so cold and calculating. That’s not the way I raised you.’

Tom nodded. ‘Apart from that one letter, Coral never made contact with me again in prison and I had to put up with that. It got easier as time went on to push the truth about Ellis to the back of my mind, but then when my release date got closer, it loomed large again.’

‘And once you did get out?’

‘I spoke to Coral straight away. I’d had a DNA test done in prison as part of the restorative justice programme. They fund certain procedures if they think it will help an inmate’s mental