Chapter 4 - Bianca Had Known About Me Longer Than I Realized
I used to think Bianca was just Gregory’s latest rich, polished bride-to-be.
I was wrong.
She had known about me—and about Emma—long before the wedding invitations went out.
I learned that the night after the beach fight.
My father took me and Emma back to his house. Emma fell asleep against my shoulder in the car, still wearing his suit jacket around her because her dress had been cut beyond saving. After I tucked her into bed, my father sat across from me in the library and placed a second envelope on the table.
He had kept it for years.
It was a copy of an email printed from an anonymous account. It had arrived two years earlier and contained only one sentence:
Ask Gregory’s fiancée why she paid to keep your name off the charity gala guest list.
At the time, my father had dismissed it as gossip.
Now he believed it mattered.
He dug deeper that night, called in a favor, and by morning he had enough to confirm it: Bianca had known Gregory had a daughter. She had been helping him bury the truth.
The gala guest list was only the beginning.
She had blocked letters.
Intercepted a school fundraising request.
And once, when Emma was five, Bianca had apparently complained to Gregory that “the child is starting to look too much like him.”
That line made my father go silent for a very long time.
The woman who slashed my child’s dress hadn’t acted out of sudden cruelty on the beach.
She had acted out of years of resentment.
Emma was proof that Gregory had built his perfect future on top of a lie Bianca had agreed to help maintain.
And once I understood that, I stopped thinking of the wedding as an ugly scene.
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It was an exposure.
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