Betrayed On My Wedding Eve Chapter 37

Betrayed On My Wedding Eve Chapter 37

A few more months passed.

I got nowhere trying to find Julian’s remains.

I went into that section of forest many times. But I’d been running in the dark and had no idea which direction I’d gone.

Eventually I had to stop.

I started organizing old photos.

I began writing Julian’s story on my blog. One piece at a time.

Three years on, the details had started blurring. I was afraid of losing more. That was all it was, at first.

But the posts took off.

Comments flooding in. Thousands of people wanting to know more.

Someone wrote: It’s deep in the bones of people like him to make something grow wherever they land.

Former patients found him in the posts.

Dr. Julian was so kind. When my mother was sick and confused, he never once got impatient with her.

He did magic tricks for my daughter too. His supervisor thought he was playing cards and chewed him out for it.

I pieced together who he’d been in all the days before we met.

Not long after, Brendan called.

He’d screenshotted one of my posts.

“Is this you?”

“Yes.”

He went still. Then something broke open in his face.

“It’s my brother.”

“Yes.”

“I should have known. I should have known.

“The way you always looked at my face.”

He put his head down.

“Is he okay?”

I hadn’t gotten to that part yet. He didn’t know.

“He’s not okay.

“He died. Three years ago.”

The phone slipped out of Brendan’s hand.

Fell hard.

A long pause before the picture came back. He was barely holding it together.

“He’s dead?

“Why didn’t I know?

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would you say?”

I looked at him evenly.

“All those years. Did anyone in your family ever care about him?”

Brendan shook. Couldn’t meet my eyes.

The first time I met Brendan’s parents, I’d asked carefully whether he had siblings.

His mother waved her hand. “No.”

And Brendan said: “There was one. But you can think of him as gone.”

I asked what he meant.

He threw his bowl and told me the subject was off-limits.

He hated Julian for escaping. For making him the one left behind.

His parents hated Julian for being the child they couldn’t control.

So how could I have ever told them?

I raised my chin.

“Stop with the tears. You want to know why he ended up out there?

“You all drove him here.”

Brendan hung up.