Anyway, she confirmed what Anthony had told me as true. I had no father who loved me before I was even born as she had previously told me. My father had paid for sex from my mother. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it was for me to sleep that night. My friend's betrayal and my own new lineage weighed heavily on my mind. Since I could not sleep, I stayed awake deciding how to get my revenge. At first I contemplated murder. I'm not entirely proud of that, but Rebecca could not marry Simon if he were dead.
But then I decided on something better. Something they would never see coming.
You see, I know Rebecca loved me just as I loved her, but she made her choice. She chose money and a title over love, and I would have to find a way to make her see the error of her ways.
By the time the sun came up, I was ready to set my plan into motion. I still had time to get her away from Simon. I just had to make her see that I could take care of her.
A few weeks later, I learned Rebecca had married Hartwell. Just like that. No long engagement. No proper ceremony. I could barely find the energy to get out of bed the next morning. Up until that time, I had still held onto hope that she would change her mind and follow her heart. Her heart led to me, I knew it did. But after the announcement came, I knew better.
That's when the wheels began spinning faster in my mind. If Rebecca had been a pocket watch or some other possession, Simon and Anthony both would have been thrown in jail for thievery. The same went for Rebecca — she was my possession, my own personal love, and they had conspired to take her away from me. Anthony knew exactly what he was doing when he told her I was the bastard son of a duke. He knew it… He'd done it to keep me from marrying her because he didn't feel I was good enough for her.
I'd show him how good I was…
A few months later, I went to a party thrown by Edward Lofton, one of the richest men in all of Darenset — a very important thing to me, indeed, for this man had no title. He had gained his wealth from ownership of a textile factory and, at the time I assumed, luck. I met his daughter there, a naive little thing named Cecelia. She was nothing like Rebecca. Her hair wasn't nearly as spectacular. Her face was a bit too tanned and she had one tooth in the bottom of her mouth that crooked behind the other.
Still…
She seemed smitten with me, and I played the part of smitten lover back. I knew I could never love another woman as I had loved Rebecca, but I also knew that to get anywhere in life, I needed to marry — marry well — and have a family. You may see the irony in this after how ill I thought Rebecca for doing the same, but my heart had hardened. If I couldn't have love with Rebecca, then I would have to settle for money and power. To get that power, I had to marry well and that meant, putting all of my feelings and disgust aside and marrying the mousey Cecelia Lofton
The good thing about our union — the only good thing mind you — was that I got to spend lots of time with her father and learned the ins and outs of the textile factory. When he died, it all became mine: the factory, his wealth, and his collection of sins.
He is the one who taught me how to get ahead in this world. He said if you knew something on someone, then he would do whatever you wanted to keep the sin from getting out. So all I had to do was keep my eyes out, keep my ears open, and I'd learn everyone's sins. Then all I had to do was threaten to expose them and everything I ever wanted would be mine.
Well, not everything I wanted…
A few years after Rebecca married Simon, I passed him walking down the street. He had a little girl in his arms, a girl about the same age as our Trudy. The girl looked so much like her mother that it hurt to look at her.
The girl, he told me her name was Emma, should have been my daughter. Not the sickly girl I could never take out with me. Not the girl who had cried the first year of her life and was ill. Emma was beautiful, kind, smart. She was everything a father could want in a daughter. And she should have been mine.
Simon introduced me to her, but acted as if he'd rather be anywhere else. I, however, was exactly where I wanted to be and smiled at my good fortune. He said he'd heard I'd married and now owned the factory. I nodded and told him I'd heard he was expecting another child, to which he answered yes.
He appeared to want to ask me something else, and I lingered just to hear what he had to say for himself. "It has been years since that incident at Anthony's manor."
It might have been years, but it felt as though only days.
"We are both happy now, you and I. Married to our loves. We both have daughters and Anthony, he has a son. Can we let the past stay in the past? Can we all move on with our lives and look to the future? Can our feud be over?"