“Before we go any further,” he finally said, “I want everyone to read this.”
Margaret raised an eyebrow, annoyed.
“What kind of nonsense is this at Christmas?”
Daniel opened the folder and pushed the documents toward the center of the table. There were medical reports, printed emails, photographs, notarized statements. My brother-in-law took a sheet. My father-in-law another.
The laughter stopped.
The glasses hung suspended in midair.
The color drained from Margaret’s face.
“This… this shouldn’t be here,” she murmured.
Daniel looked at her for the first time that night.
“You’ve spent nine years making sure Emily feels less. That’s enough.”
I still didn’t know what those pages contained.
But I knew, from the way no one dared to speak, that nothing would ever be the same.
I read through the documents while the table remained unnaturally silent. My heart pounded, as if each page were about to explode in my hands.
The first report was medical. Dated nine years earlier, from a private hospital in Madrid. My husband’s name appeared repeatedly. Diagnoses. Treatments. One word underlined several times: irreversible infertility.
I looked up at Daniel, confused.
“What is this…?”
“Keep reading,” he said, his voice grave.
The next pages were emails. Between Margaret and a fertility clinic in Valencia. Payments. Instructions. Confidentiality clauses.
Then I understood.
Emily wasn’t “less” to Margaret because of her personality, her school performance, or on a whim.
Emily was adopted.
But not by me.
By Daniel.
Before we met.
“Mom never accepted that I couldn’t have biological children,” Daniel said. “When I adopted Emily as a single man, she took it as a personal humiliation.”
Margaret slammed her hand on the table.
“That’s not true!”
Daniel turned another page. Photographs. Transcribed recorded conversations.
“Here you talk about ‘a borrowed child.’ About ‘a temporary burden.’ About how she ‘doesn’t deserve the same treatment.’”
My father-in-law stood up slowly, pale.
“Did you say that to our granddaughter?”
Margaret didn’t answer.
“You know what the worst part is?” Daniel continued. “It’s not that you never wanted her. It’s that you tried to take her from me.”
The last stack of documents confirmed everything: a failed lawsuit, filed years earlier, where Margaret had tried to prove that Daniel was unfit to be a father. She had lost the case. I never knew.
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