I Dumped My Groom and Married My Childhood Crush in 30 Minutes novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Letter

The old lawyer broke the wax with his thumb.

"Mr. Harcourt asked me to read this aloud," he said. "He was clear that it be read to the whole room."

"I forbid it," Eleanor said.

"You have no standing to forbid, Eleanor. The firm is not yours to forbid with."

He unfolded two pages.

His hands were old, but his voice did not shake.

"To my eldest son," he read. "If you are hearing this, your mother is sixty and I am long dead, and she has not told you."

Nobody breathed.

"Thirty-one years ago Eleanor and I were not married. My father had written into his own will that any child of mine born outside marriage would be cut off, and the firm would go to my cousins."

Tobias had gone gray.

"Eleanor was twenty-nine. She had our baby in the county hospital under her own name, because she was too frightened to give another. She gave him to the groundskeeper's wife that same night, who had lost a child that spring and could not stop crying."

Conway's hand found mine.

"I let her. God forgive me, I let her. We married eleven weeks later, after my father died. Tobias was born the year after."

A woman near me put her hand over her mouth.

"I watched my first son grow up through the study window. I watched him cut my lawn at twelve. I watched him carry a boat on his back at sixteen. I never told him, because Eleanor begged me not to, and because I was a coward."

The lawyer stopped to clear his throat.

"The firm is his. I have written it so that no one can move it. On his mother's sixtieth birthday, in front of her guests, the firm and the name pass to my eldest living son, Conway Redfern, and the trustee may contest it for thirty days and no longer."

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