The statement lay there in front of me.
Black ink on white paper, and just looking at it made my chest tighten.
It said I had drugged Finn three years ago, then used a pregnancy to force him into marriage.
It said that after the wedding I'd milked the child for money, greedy and never satisfied.
Not one word was true.
And yet it read like a crime the Hensons had drafted for me long ago.
I lifted my head and looked Finn dead in the eye.
"You really think I'd ruin my whole life just to marry you?"
Finn stared back, his eyes cold.
"The test report's sitting right there."
"Because of you, Phoebe had to leave the country! Marie, it's not that I never gave you a chance to explain. You just never could explain a thing."
That report from three years ago had been crushing me for three years.
It wasn't issued by the police. It came from a private testing lab the Hensons did business with.
The report said his blood sample showed traces of a drug.
And every step of the testing process had been handled by Linda, start to finish.
Back then I knelt on the floor and begged him to look at the original, just once. He threw the report in my face instead.
"You're still trying to deny it?"
That question. I still remembered every word.
Linda sat on the sofa, calmly blowing the foam off her tea.
"Sign it. Sign it and your father's old place stays standing."
She didn't even lift her eyelids.
"Otherwise, I have plenty of ways to turn it into collateral for someone else's debt."
She knew exactly where to cut.
That house was the only piece of my father I had left.
Dinner came around.
Linda deliberately told the staff not to set a place for me.
The Henson relatives took their seats one by one. I stood off to the side, and no one acknowledged me.
Someone covered her mouth and snickered.
"You can always tell when they're from some backwater town. First-rate at climbing into a man's bed. If it weren't for her, our Finn would've married into the Hardy family by now."
I dug my nails hard into my palm and swallowed the words.
Phoebe sighed and pulled a document out of her bag.
"Miss Swanson, this is a note from your gynecological records. I had someone look it up."
She arranged her face into something like concern.
"It says here, "suspected history of contact with non-fixed partners"."
"Your health is so fragile. I have to wonder if it isn't from the miscarriage at all, but something from before that already⋯⋯"
She didn't finish, but the meaning landed clearly enough.
Linda pounced.
"No wonder she couldn't even hold on to the baby!"
She slapped her chopsticks down on the table.
"Something that filthy at the root, of course whatever she carried came out a curse!"
Seeing her chance, Phoebe took out her phone and cast it to the living room television.
It was a video.
On the screen, Garry was supporting me into a hospital room. I had no strength left, and my forehead rested against his shoulder.
Phoebe had cut out the part where I'd just come off the operating table and couldn't stay on my feet.
She'd left only those few seconds, the ones most likely to spark people's imaginations.
Finn watched the clip, and his face turned ugly.
He walked up to me and dropped his voice.
"So you've been so set on divorce because of him?"
I looked at him, and suddenly I laughed.
"Finn, I'd just come out of surgery. I couldn't even stand."
"And all you saw was me leaning on someone for one second?"
He said nothing.
After dinner, I went upstairs to the study to get something.
I'd barely reached the door when Linda's sharp voice slipped through the gap left by the half-closed door.
Phoebe had put a voice message on speaker inside.
"Don't keep the original alcohol test at the old house. Tomorrow at the birthday party, make her read the statement to the end, and this whole thing gets nailed shut for good."
Something dropped in my chest.
The report from three years ago. There really was something wrong with it.
I dialed Garry.
"Garry, that report from the private lab three years ago. Can it still be reviewed now?"
Garry was quiet for a moment.
"If there's a seal number, a chain-of-custody record, or a retained sample number, we can check whether the process was tampered with."
I hung up and drew in a deep breath.
Back in the living room, Finn pressed a pen into my hand.
"Sign it, and I'll tell Mom to leave your father's house alone."
I pulled off the cap and wrote four words on the back of the page.
"Divorce agreement."
Finn's face went cold. He snatched the paper and tore it apart.
"Marie, you're going to regret this."
That night, I went back to my rented apartment.
My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
"If you want to know the truth about that test report, go to Spencer's birthday party tomorrow."
I stared at the words on the screen, my fingers tightening.
