Chapter 2

Two:

My face stayed calm, edged with contempt, nothing in it that looked like a woman caught in an affair.

That wasn't all.

I pulled my son forward and told everyone to look at him next to my husband's funeral portrait.

“Anyone with working eyes can see it. My son and Daniel came out of the same mold.”

“If my son is illegitimate, if I got him by cheating, then who did I cheat with, Daniel's twin brother?”

“You all know how much my in-laws love money. You've all heard about the things they've done for it.”

What I said made sense.

So the relatives and friends in the room recovered a little of their reason, and some of them, once I nudged them, began to remember the “glorious deeds” of Edward Edwards and Stacy Salazar.

A few of the things Edward and Stacy had just said were actually true.

Like the part where they disliked me the first moment they laid eyes on me. That one was real.

Daniel knew exactly what his parents were, so before the wedding he never once brought me home, and he didn't even invite them to the ceremony.

But they heard about it from relatives and showed up uninvited, pulling out a “Handbook for the Edwards Family Wife” and reading it aloud right there at the wedding.

The very first rule demanded that I sign over to Edward the house my parents had left me.

The reason was that they planned to move in later to help take care of us, and they couldn't stand living under someone else's roof.

The second rule was slightly better. They wanted Daniel and me to hand over our paycheck cards and our savings for them to control, and if we needed to spend any of it, we had to apply a week in advance.

All the way until Daniel cut them off, I hadn't heard a single line in that handbook about honoring one's in-laws or doing housework.

The wedding turned into a farce, and afterward, when I picked the handbook up and looked it over, there were thousands of clauses, and every single one pointed to a single word: “money”.

And it was because of that wedding that Daniel finally made up his mind to cut ties with them...

Three:

Plenty of the people in the room had seen these things with their own eyes and heard them with their own ears.

The reason no one thought of it in my past life was that I never reminded anyone. I was too busy denying everything in a rage, and I walked straight into their trap.

This time I first laid out how much my son looked like my husband, then reminded everyone of the rest, so the suspicion in the room quickly turned to sympathy.

Stacy went blank for a moment.

Then she started arguing at once.

“The only reason we made a scene at the wedding was because of you.”

“You egged my son on, kept the marriage from us, and that's why we were angry, that's why we brought up money at the wedding.”

“We apologized afterward too. It was you who forced Daniel not to forgive us, you who forced Daniel to break with us.”

But no matter what Stacy said, no one's expression changed.

Stacy frowned, clutched Daniel's portrait, and burst into loud sobs.

“What parent doesn't love their own child?”

“All we wanted back then was to secure a few things for Daniel. How did that turn into our own daughter-in-law pointing at our faces and calling us money-grubbers?”

“Daniel's been dead in that crash only a few days, and you couldn't wait to cremate him. Isn't that because you're afraid everyone will find out the truth about how he died?”

Edward joined in, wailing along.

“Before Daniel died, I even got a call from him. He admitted his mistakes to me himself, right there on the phone, and he told me that little bastard isn't his own blood.”

To prove he wasn't lying.

Edward even made a point of taking out his phone and playing a recording of a call between him and Daniel. But I didn't have to guess to know it was a fake, an AI-synthesized recording.

The others didn't know that, though.

The way they saw it, Edward and Stacy loved money, sure, but there was no reason for anyone to joke about something like this.

I still didn't deny anything.

I just looked at Edward and Stacy, both on the verge of crying themselves unconscious.

“Since the two of you can't bear to lose Daniel.”

“Then where were you when Daniel was dying?”

“When I called you, why did you tell me to give up on treatment? Is that not bearing to lose him? Is that love?”