After Five Years of Lies, I Left the Family and Made Them Regret It Chapter 09

After Five Years of Lies, I Left the Family and Made Them Regret It Chapter 09

The next day, Adrian was nowhere to be seen outside the rehabilitation centre.

Before leaving Toronto, he asked his lawyer to give me a file.

Inside was the complete evidence from the crash five years earlier, records showing how the Bennett family had arranged for Serena to leave the country, and a written statement in Adrian’s own hand.

He admitted that he had helped conceal Serena’s true whereabouts and had used the Moretti family’s connections over the years to help her avoid the legal consequences she should have faced.

If that statement was handed over, both his position and reputation within the Moretti family would suffer.

The lawyer asked whether he was doing it in exchange for my forgiveness.

Adrian shook his head.

“She doesn’t owe me forgiveness. I owe her the truth.”

In the end, I chose to reopen the crash case and gave my lawyer the evidence proving that Serena’s supposed imprisonment had been fabricated.

When the police took Serena in for questioning, my parents panicked for the first time.

They called me one after another, reminding me that I still carried the Bennett name and begging me to drop the case.

Mum cried over the phone.

“Serena has a child, Evelyn. She’s our only biological daughter. We can’t let her life be ruined again.”

I asked her one question.

“And what about mine?”

There was a long silence on the other end.

Five years earlier, they had brushed aside the loss of my child and the damage to my left leg with one sentence.

*You still have Adrian.*

Five years later, after Adrian betrayed me, they decided that an adopted daughter had no inheritance rights anyway, so losing me wouldn’t affect the Bennett family’s core interests.

It wasn’t that they didn’t know I was hurting.

From the very beginning, they had simply believed Serena’s bloodline and place in the family mattered more than my life.

I didn’t drop the case, and I stopped taking their calls.

—

After Adrian returned to New York, he moved out of the Upper East Side apartment.

He continued to fulfil his responsibilities as Noah’s father, but refused to carry on the relationship with Serena that they had kept hidden behind years of lies.

The child had done nothing wrong.

But that didn’t mean Adrian had the right to keep interfering with my future just to make it look as though everything was fine between the two families.

He sold the apartment and transferred the portion legally belonging to me to my lawyer.

With the rest, he set up a rehabilitation fund for road accident victims in the name of the baby we had lost.

He never told me about it.

I only found out because my lawyer mentioned it in passing while going through the final case documents.

I wasn’t moved.

Nothing he did afterwards could change the harm that had already been done.

But at least this time, he had finally chosen to do the right thing without expecting it to bring me back.

—

A year later, I completed my final round of rehabilitation.

My left leg would never move as freely as it once had, and it still ached whenever the weather turned cold.

But I could now walk long distances on my own without holding on to anyone.

The day our divorce became final, Adrian sent me an email.

He didn’t ask me to come back to New York, and he didn’t say he would wait for me.

There were only two short lines.

*Evelyn, I’m sorry.*

*I won’t bother you again.*

I stared at them for a long time and, in the end, didn’t reply.

—

That winter, I returned to New York briefly for a follow-up appointment.

When I walked out of the Hospital for Special Surgery, heavy snow was falling.

Adrian was standing across the street.

He had probably only come to drop off paperwork for the rehabilitation fund and hadn’t expected to see me.

When our eyes met, he didn’t immediately come over and start making decisions for me like he used to.

He simply stood on the other side of the traffic and watched me quietly.

Only when the pedestrian signal changed did he walk over.

“Does your leg still hurt?”

“Sometimes.”

“How are you getting on in Toronto?”

“Very well.”

He nodded, looking as though he wanted to say something else.

“The snow’s getting heavier. It’s slippery underfoot.”

And then he heard someone hurrying out behind me with an umbrella already open, laughing and urging me to hurry up.

Adrian’s expression shifted when he saw me walk over to my friend, but he still lowered his hand.

“Evelyn.”

I turned around.

Through the wind and snow, his voice sounded very quiet.

“If I hadn’t lied to you back then, do you think we’d still be together?”

I looked at the man I had spent so many years loving, and so many years hating.

“Maybe. But we can’t go back. And what’s happened has happened.”

Adrian’s eyes reddened, but he didn’t ask me to stay.

He nodded and walked away through the snow.

This time, he finally understood that since I didn’t want to go back, he had no right to keep using his presence to interfere with my life.

—

After that, Adrian never contacted me again.

I returned every gift my parents sent.

I never forgave them, but I also stopped wasting my time and energy hating them.

My left leg would always remind me that those five years had been real.

But the Bennett and Moretti families could no longer use those scars to keep me trapped.

They were only proof that those things had happened, and proof that I had already left them behind.

—

When spring came, I walked to the shore of Lake Ontario on my own for the first time without a cane.

The wind off the lake was strong.

I stood steady.

Suddenly, I remembered what Mum had said when I left the Phoenix Hotel.

*Once you walk out that door, you’re never to come back.*

They had thought those words would frighten me.

Instead, they were the words that finally gave me the courage to leave them for good.