Seven Years As His Wife… Until My Own Son Called Me A Homewrecker Chapter 01

Seven Years As His Wife… Until My Own Son Called Me A Homewrecker Chapter 01

The day my husband, Adrian Blackwood, took his company public, our son Noah and I sat in the front row as he rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

Six-year-old Noah was invited onstage to say a few words. He took the microphone, looked straight at me, and asked, “Mom, is it true you stole Dad from another woman and then married him?”

The room went dead silent. Then camera shutters exploded, every lens turning toward my bloodless face.

“Mrs. Blackwood, is that true?”

“Her own son said it. It has to be true.”

“Mr. Blackwood had a childhood sweetheart, didn’t he? They broke up out of nowhere. Maybe she was the reason.”

***

I rushed onto the stage, desperate to explain, but Adrian laid a hand over mine before I could speak.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what she did.”

The words struck harder than a slap. I turned to him, unable to believe what I had heard.

He lowered his voice. “Vanessa is sitting right there. You know how fragile she is. She believes you broke us up, and denying it will only set her off again.

“She’s like a sister to me. Just hold on a little longer. Once she recovers, I’ll tell everyone the truth. I’ll make it clear that we fell in love, got married, and had Noah together.”

Just a little longer.

A bitter smile touched my lips. I had been “holding on” for an entire year, ever since Adrian rescued Vanessa from her kidnappers.

Her memories were so distorted that she believed I had stolen Adrian and broken them up. So nine times out of ten, she slapped me whenever she saw me.

She mistook dreams for reality and insisted Adrian was her husband, so I had been forced out of my own bedroom while he stayed with her every night until she fell asleep.

Even Noah became her son whenever she had an episode. For six months, I had been allowed to see my own child only in secret.

And now my own son was publicly asking whether I had stolen his father from another woman to become his wife.

But I had never stolen Adrian from anyone.

I had loved him quietly for years, but I had never once tried to break him and Vanessa Hale up. They had grown up together and were the golden couple at school.

Everyone expected their love story to end at the altar, and I had resigned myself to cheering them on from a distance.

Then Vanessa ran away on their wedding day. She left a message saying she had found her soulmate and that history could never compete with true love.

Adrian, heir to the Blackwood fortune, was left alone before hundreds of guests.

With his family humiliated and the press watching, he gripped the microphone and asked, “Is there anyone here willing to marry me?”

Plenty of women wanted to. I was the only one who stood up.

At first, Adrian treated me with distant courtesy.

Everything changed after I went to meet him at the airport and shoved him out of the path of an oncoming car.

I was unconscious for seven days.

When I woke, he was holding my hand.

“Why did you do it?” he asked.

“Because I love you. I always have.”

I loved him enough to put his life before mine.

He spent that entire night smoking on the balcony. The next morning, he pulled me into his arms and said hoarsely, “Mia, let’s have a child.”

After that, he stopped treating me like a stranger. He answered my good-morning and good-night texts. He had his assistant choose gifts for our anniversaries and let me know whenever work kept him late.

I thought he had finally begun to love me, even if only a little.

Then, one year ago, Vanessa called him.

“Adrian, I’ve been kidnapped. Please save me.”

Only then did he learn what had happened after she left him.

The man she had followed overseas had trapped and exploited her. When she developed psychiatric problems, he abandoned her to criminals, and on the way to being taken somewhere remote, she remembered Adrian’s number.

He had never changed it.

The call came on our anniversary. Adrian forgot our plans and went after her without a second thought.

I had convinced myself he was only protecting someone who had once been family. Now even my son was almost hers.

A sharp slap snapped me back to the present.

Vanessa stood before me in a gown designed to match Adrian’s tuxedo. “Homewrecker!” she screamed. “What right do you have to stand beside him? Get her out of here!”

Security rushed onto the stage. One guard pressed a stun baton against my back while Noah spat at me.

“I don’t want a bad woman for a mom!” He clung to Vanessa’s leg and stared at me with open disgust.

Water bottles and crumpled programs flew from the audience. I stumbled back and looked to Adrian for help.

All he said was, “Escort Ms. Bennett out.”

As the guards carried me from the hall, I saw him draw Vanessa into his arms. He looked at her as if she were the most precious thing in the world.

He had never looked at me that way.

I sat on the pavement outside and forced back my tears. The beautiful lie I had lived for seven years was finally over.

I took out my phone and texted my attorney.

[Please prepare the divorce papers.]

[I won’t seek custody of Noah.]