Under the faint scrape of correction ink, another name remained.
Thomas Reed.
The room tilted.
Brent took one step back. “What the hell?”
My father’s face turned gray.
My mother reached for me, but I moved away before she could touch my sleeve.
“Claire,” she said, breaking on my name. “It wasn’t that simple.”
I almost laughed.
All my life, that had been the family motto.
It wasn’t that simple.
The missing college fund was not that simple.
The cruel comments were not that simple.
The favoritism was not that simple.
The way they treated my children like visitors in their own bloodline was not that simple.
But the paper in my hand was brutally simple.
My father was not my father.
The man my family had trained me to hate had been erased from my life because the truth would have exposed too many lies at once.
