Three months after my mother’s funeral, my father married her sister. I told myself grief makes people do strange things, repeating it until it almost sounded reasonable. My mother had spent three years dying of cancer, worrying about everyone else until her last breath. I thought nothing could hurt more than losing her. I was wrong.
At the small wedding, my brother arrived late and pulled me aside, shaken. He told me our mother had prepared for this moment. While she was dying, she discovered my father had been having a long-term affair—with her sister. Worse, the child everyone believed belonged to another man was actually my father’s. When she confronted him, he dismissed her fears as paranoia brought on by illness.
Before she died, my mother rewrote her will. Quietly. Legally. Everything went to us. She left instructions for a lawyer to contact my brother if our father remarried—especially if he married Laura. The envelope she left behind held the truth she refused to let poison her final months.
When we confronted them at the reception, my father’s relief turned to panic. Laura stepped away from him that same day. Months later, she left for good. My mother never raised her voice, never made a scene. She didn’t fight while she was dying.