The Price of a Stolen Marriage Chapter 05
Chapter 05 Forty Years Stolen
Silence fell over the room.
Benjamin stood on the stage, the smile frozen on his face. “W-What did you just say?”
“I said Natalie’s grandfather and Christopher’s grandfather are the same person.”
My voice was not loud, but every word hit the audience like a nail driven into their ears.
“Forty years ago, someone drugged you, and you spent the night with my mother, Grace Bennett. The next morning, your current wife was lying beside you wearing my mother’s clothes. You have face blindness. You couldn’t tell one person from another, so you married her.
“And my mother was thrown out of the Ashcroft family. She was carrying your child. She went back to the countryside, where people called her a whore for the rest of her life. Until the day she died, she never got to set foot in Kingsport again.”
The audience erupted.
Some people shot to their feet. Others leaned together, whispering. More pulled out their phones and started recording.
Benjamin’s face turned as pale as paper. “Y-You’re lying…”
“Lying?” I let out a cold laugh and pressed the remote in my hand.
The giant screen lit up. A faded old photograph appeared before everyone.
It was my mother as a young woman, two braids draped over her shoulders, standing beneath an old locust tree.
Then came one handwritten letter after another.
“Benjamin, I’m pregnant.”
“Benjamin, I went to Kingsport to find you. They wouldn’t let me through the gate,”
“Benjamin, I don’t blame you. You just mistook someone else for me.”
Every letter was in my mother’s handwriting, uneven and shaky. She had barely gone to school, and she had learned to write from other people.
Then came a handwriting analysis report.
The comparison sample was the letter Benjamin had written to drive my mother away all those years ago.
“Grace, you’re nothing more than a maid’s daughter. Don’t get any ideas about marrying into this family. Here’s some money. Take it and leave. Don’t ever come looking for me again.”
“Mr. Ashcroft, your handwriting has already been authenticated.”
Benjamin staggered and grabbed the podium to keep himself from falling.
In the audience, Hailey jumped to her feet, her voice as sharp as a knife. “It’s fake! Every bit of it is fake! This woman is making everything up!”
I looked at her. “Fake?”
A recording began playing on the big screen.
“She’s nothing but a maid’s daughter. What gives her the right to marry Benjamin? I raised that girl for twenty years. It’s time she repaid me.”
It was Benjamin’s mother, Laura Carter.
Back when my mother worked as a maid for the Ashcroft family, she had secretly recorded it with an old tape recorder. That recorder eventually made its way to me. The tape had become moldy with age, and it had taken more than six months to restore it.
Hailey’s face was drained of all color.
“It was your mother-in-law who drugged him. You were the one who put on my mother’s clothes. You were the one who kept my mother outside the gate. You were the one who made Benjamin write that letter.”
I enunciated every single word. “You stole my mother’s life. And you stole forty years from her.”
Someone in the audience started clapping. Then another. Then several more.
I recognized them.
They were members of the families that the Ashcroft family had crushed years ago.
They had come today for one reason-to watch the Ashcroft family fall.
