After Discovering My Billionaire Parents Lied, I Vanished for Good Chapter 10

After Discovering My Billionaire Parents Lied, I Vanished for Good Chapter 10

He raised his hand again, then coughed up a mouthful of black blood and collapsed.

Vanessa wasn’t surprised at all. She grinned smugly. “Garrett, you’ll spend the rest of your life in a hospital bed. By the way, you thought you were just exhausted from overworking? I’ve been slipping poison into your food for the past two years.”

“Oh, and Branson isn’t your son. He’s from another man. Thanks for building him an empire, though.”

Garrett passed out from rage.

When he woke, he was in a hospital room, unable to move a limb, unable to speak. Tears of regret slipped from his eyes as he caught sight of the guards stationed outside the door.

He was under house arrest.

And that agonizing, hollow captivity stretched on for five endless years.

He lay in that hospital bed day after day, staring at the ceiling. He replayed every memory he had of Aiden: the boy bringing home straight A report cards, the boy working part-time jobs at fourteen, the boy asking for a tablet and getting slapped for it.

Five years later, armed agents stormed the hospital. They took down the guards. The door swung open.

A woman walked in. It’s Agent Quinn.

“Garrett Whitmore. You’re free. Vanessa and Branson have been arrested on multiple felony charges.”

She turned to leave.

“Someone asked me to tell you something,” she added. “He doesn’t owe you anything.”

Garrett struggled upright, voice cracked and trembling. “Aiden? Is it Aiden?”

Quinn paused. “Does it matter?”

He scrambled off the bed and stumbled over to her. “Please! Let me see him. Just once.”

“Sorry. He doesn’t want to.”

As she reached the door, Garrett yelled frantically, “Tell him I’m sorry. I want to make it right.”

“He doesn’t need anything from you. He’s doing fine.”

“One look, just one!”

“His exact words,” Quinn stated flatly, “were ‘Never’.”

She walked out with her team.

Deprived of his last shred of hope, Garrett’s strength abandoned him entirely. He collapsed onto the cold floor.

Outside, Quinn dialed a classified line.

“Honey, he asked to see you.”

At that moment, I was shirtless in a creek, catching crabs with my hands. My three-year-old son sat steadily on a rock, clapping his hands in excitement. This was peace. This was the family I’d chosen.

All around us, stern-faced armed personnel kept a sharp watch on every movement.

Into the phone, I said, “No.”

“I figured. So I shut him down.”

“They gave me life. I’ve paid them back in full.”

“Wrap it up and come home. Your son misses you.”

“Got it.”

I hung up just as the director of the research institute pulled up in his car. He stepped out, his face flushed with excitement. “Aiden, the test results for your research just came back. It’s completely stable.”

He ran over to me immediately and leaned in close to whisper. “If the nuclear fusion runs steady long-term, you’ll go down in history. You’ll be immortalized!”

I smiled, glancing at my boy splashing in the water.

“I never wanted to be immortalized.”

Years later, my wife told me my father had confessed to my mother. She’d forgiven him.

He’d lost all interest in the company. They went to every major city, taped up posters in every language, spoke to every private investigator in the world.

The reward for my whereabouts climbed from ten million dollars to one billion dollars, a futile fortune offered in exchange for a trace of the son they’d destroyed.

But no amount of wealth, no span of endless years, no desperate effort could ever find me.

In their world, I’d vanished. Completely.

(The End)