Silence dropped over the whole table.
My mother looked at Claire. “I’m so sorry.”
Claire didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
“He told us you wanted nothing to do with this family anymore,” my mother said. “I believed him.” Then she turned to me. “We will support both boys. And both of you. Whatever Derek wants doesn’t matter anymore.”
Derek tried to talk over her anyway, insisting he’d only been protecting me, that Claire loved Owen, that the arrangement had worked out fine for everyone involved.
Claire looked straight at him, her voice completely steady. “You took a child away from his mother and called it help.”
That sentence ended the conversation. Nobody had anything left to say after it.
Within days, my father had pulled Derek from a business deal he’d been counting on. Derek’s own parents refused to fund the lawyer he started threatening to hire the very next afternoon. Once the documents were sitting out in the open, Derek couldn’t control the story anymore, no matter how loud he got. Relatives found out. Then neighbors. Then longtime friends who’d always called him dependable stopped picking up when he called.
