The Man She Married After Me Chapter 2

His refusal wasn't a surprise. I had tried. It seemed my mother was destined to die with that final regret.

I tried to pull my hand back, but the window was still clamped shut, my flesh throbbing and swollen. Seeing the angry red marks, Eleanor turned to the man in the car. “Ethan, open the window.”

Only then did the glass retract. I snatched my trembling hand away.

Ethan’s face was a picture of guilt. “Frank, I’m so sorry. Why would you stick your hand in there?”

Eleanor reached for my hand, wanting to inspect the injury. I pulled away instinctively.

There was a time when she was the perfect wife. She used to trim my nails, and if she accidentally clipped the skin, she’d look up at me with those wounded eyes and whisper she was sorry. My friends would laugh at me. “You got it made, man. Married the boss lady and now you can’t stop showing it off.”

Then Ethan showed up. A DNA test confirmed it: he was the true Ashworth heir, and I was the fake.

Eleanor had promised me then, “You may not be an Ashworth, but you’re still my husband. You’re still our child’s father.” Because of her, the Ashworths let me stay, grooming Ethan to take his place.

Until the day I found them in bed together. In our bed.

“Frank,” Eleanor had said, her voice hollow. “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”

Ethan smirked at me from our marriage bed, a look of pure triumph on his face. The next second, he was on his knees, prostrating himself before me. “Brother, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have fallen for Eleanor, but I can’t help it. I love her.”

I knew he was faking it. It was all a calculated move to destroy my marriage so the Ashworths would finally cast me out. I flew at him in a rage, tearing at his clothes, striking his face. How could he use someone as good as Eleanor? I had already told the Ashworths I wanted nothing from them, that their fortune was his. I had given everything back. Why did he still have to take her from me?

I even broke the promise I’d made to my own mother, the one to keep Ethan’s disease a secret. I told Eleanor everything.

But she didn’t believe me.

She slapped me across the face. “You’re vile,” she spat. “You stole his life for twenty-three years, and now you slander him?”

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe any woman would be so indifferent to something like that.

“Frank,” she’d said, her voice cold as ice, “even if he is using me, I’m glad I can be used. I’m glad if it means he gets back everything that you stole from him.”

When she said those words, I knew. This woman didn’t love me anymore.

And I didn’t want her. All I wanted was my daughter.

Eleanor had scoffed. “Are you trying to use our child to control me? To keep a connection? Frank, I will not let my daughter be raised by someone with your background.”

I lost the custody battle. Without Eleanor, the Ashworths kicked me out for good.

That day, my real mother, wearing a thin hospital gown under a bulky winter coat, was waiting for me outside the courthouse.

Not long after, her health took a nosedive. She needed money for surgery. I went to the Ashworths, to the home I had lived in for twenty-three years. I knelt at their gate for six hours. No one came out.

I had no choice but to go to Eleanor.

She told me she would never help the woman who had tormented the man she loved.

In the end, I turned to loan sharks and high-interest online lenders. Now, I’m drowning in over a hundred thousand dollars of debt. They say for an ordinary person with no assets, a number like that is a life sentence.

If I still had my credentials, the kind of "respectable" job Eleanor talked about, the money wouldn't have been such an issue. But the pay from my current job was a drop in the ocean.

My phone rang, shattering the tense silence between the three of us. I answered it, and a panicked nurse’s voice crackled through the speaker.

“Frank? It’s your mother. She’s crashing. We’ve moved her to the ICU. You need to get here now.”

A sense of dread washed over me. I put the phone on speaker.

Eleanor immediately wrenched open the passenger door. “Get in, Frank. I’ll drive you.”

It was late and catching a cab would be impossible. I swallowed my pride and got in.

From the back seat, Ethan’s voice trembled. “Eleanor… I’m scared that woman will hit me again.”

Hearing that, a raw, protective anger surged through me. I whipped my head around to glare at him. “If she hadn’t knocked some sense into you back then, you’d have been sold for parts by those thugs you ran with! You think you’d be married to the biggest CEO in Port Crest?”