Chapter 9 - Brielle Had Not Been Certain Preston Was the Father
Brielle called me three days later.
I almost declined.
Then answered because curiosity is a powerful weakness.
She was crying.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You already did.”
A weak joke.
She did not laugh.
Then:
“Did Preston ever make you feel like everything depended on giving him a son?”
There.
Not:
help me.
Not:
I’m innocent.
That question.
“Yes.”
Silence.
“I thought so.”
“What happened?”
Brielle explained.
The affair timeline was not as clean as Preston believed.
Before she and Preston became physically involved, Brielle had been in a long on-and-off relationship with a photographer named Evan Reed.
They broke up.
Reconnected briefly.
Then ended again.
During the early period when Preston still lived with me and insisted his relationship with Brielle was:
“emotional,”
Brielle had slept with:
both men
within the same general conception window.
Not same day.
Not some tabloid triangle.
A messy overlap.
She later believed the pregnancy was Preston’s because of:
timing
and:
what her doctor initially estimated from ultrasound.
But due dates are estimates.
She knew there was:
a possibility.
“How big?”
I asked.
She cried harder.
“I don’t know.”
“Enough that you should have told him?”
“Yes.”
There.
Then:
“Why didn’t you?”
Her answer was ugly and human.
“Because when the ultrasound said boy, Preston looked at me like I had just become the most important person in the world.”
I said nothing.
She continued.
“I knew if I told him there was uncertainty, that disappeared.”
So she waited.
Told herself:
Preston was probably father.
Agreed to the test because she hoped certainty would save:
her.
Instead certainty removed:
him.
A repeat test with independently collected samples later confirmed the original exclusion.
Preston was not the biological father.
Evan eventually tested.
He was.
That created a separate life Brielle had to manage.
But again:
May you like
none of that fixed what Preston had done to his daughters.
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