After His Mistress Framed Me, the DNA Screens Exposed Them

Briella called it a private conversation. She lied about that too.

The sitting room at the Meyer estate still smelled like the lilies from last week's dinner party, sweet and a little rotten at the edges. Briella sat on the edge of the settee, hands folded over her stomach like she was cradling something precious. Her eyes were already wet before I sat down.

"I'm pregnant," she said. Her voice cracked right on cue. "It's Dylan's."

I heard footsteps stop in the hallway. Two of Dylan's cousins, frozen mid-stride, not even pretending not to listen.

I looked at Dylan. I needed him to laugh, to say this was insane, to reach for my hand the way he always did when the world tilted sideways. Instead he crossed the room and put his hand on Briella's shoulder. The hand with four fingers. The hand he cut a piece off of to prove he'd never leave me.

"Estelle," he said, quiet, careful, like I was the unstable one. "Let her rest. We'll talk later."

I walked out of that house without saying a word, because there weren't any words left. Three years of scripture, gone in one sentence.

I didn't get later.

I was halfway down the hall when I heard the scream. By the time I turned, Briella was already falling, arms flailing, hitting every step on the way down like she'd rehearsed it. Which she had.

"She pushed me!" Briella's voice tore through the foyer. "Estelle pushed me!"

Staff came running from both sides, too fast, too positioned, like they'd been standing there waiting for a cue. Two more relatives appeared on the landing below, right where they'd get the best view. Someone was already calling an ambulance before Briella finished screaming.

"I didn't touch her," I said. Nobody heard me. Nobody wanted to.

They formed a wall around her on the marble floor, and I stood outside it, invisible, guilty by the simple fact of being the one left standing.

---

The hospital lights were too white. I remember that most, standing in that corridor waiting for someone to ask me what happened. Nobody asked.

Dylan came through the doors like a storm that had already decided who to destroy. He didn't look at the security camera blinking above the nurses' station. He didn't look for a doctor. He looked at me, and his face had nothing of the man who once knelt in front of his whole family and cut his own finger off for me.

"You did this," he said.

"Dylan, I never touched her—"

His hand closed around my arm before I finished the sentence. He pulled me down. I felt my knees hit the marble first, then his palm on the back of my head, pressing.

"Apologize to her."

"Dylan—"

"Apologize."

My forehead met the floor. Cold, then sharp. I heard a nurse gasp somewhere behind me. I heard Briella, on the gurney through the open door, crying softly into her hand—except I caught the corner of her mouth, just for a second, curling up before she remembered to look devastated.

Something warm ran down into my eye. I didn't need a mirror to know it was blood.

And right there, forehead against tile, blood pooling white to red beneath me, I felt it happen. Not a break. A death. Three years of loving Dylan Meyer, gone as quiet and total as a light switched off.

---

I don't remember the drive home. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, in the apartment I never gave up even after he asked me to move into his penthouse, pressing a washcloth to the cut above my brow. The apartment was small and plain and mine, and for the first time in three years, that felt like enough.

I didn't cry. I kept waiting to, and it never came.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Unknown number. I almost didn't look.

*I know who the father really is. If you want the truth, meet me.*

*—Massimo Castillo*

I read it twice. I didn't know the name. I didn't know how a stranger had my number, or how he knew there was a truth worth knowing, or why he'd chosen tonight, of all nights, to send it.

But I sat there with blood drying on my temple and I thought about Briella's mouth curling up on that gurney, and I thought, someone else sees it too.

I typed back four words.

*Tell me when. Where.*

Then I set the phone down, pressed the cloth harder against the cut, and, for the first time since I was twenty-one years old, I didn't think about Dylan Meyer at all.