Chapter 3The Thirty-Year Bluff

After Liam left, Thomas and I sat in the living room in deafening silence.

What's done was done. Whatever we said now felt pale and powerless.

After weighing the pros and cons repeatedly, I suppressed the urge to scream and asked Thomas: "What is your plan?"

Thomas stammered for a long time before finally saying: "Stella, we're both getting older. Our bodies aren't as strong as they used to be. If we had someone around to take care of us, it would be..."

I cut him off: "Save the bullshit. I will never accept him."

The kid is his, not mine. Having him "take care" of me? Does he think I want to be suffocated in my sleep?

Liam looked at me with nothing but hostility. I'm not blind; I could see it perfectly well.

It wasn't that I hadn't considered divorce. But a divorce meant Thomas would get half of our marital assets. Those assets were the result of our combined efforts over more than half a lifetime. Even if it was only half, I refused to let it fall into the hands of someone like Liam.

Thomas's expression shifted several times, eventually suppressing his temper. He rambled on, the gist of it being that what happened happened, Liam carries the Sterling bloodline, and it's impossible for him not to acknowledge his own son.

It's not like the Sterling family has a royal throne to pass down. "Only bloodline," my ass.

Seeing that my expression remained stone-cold, Thomas finally gritted his teeth and played his trump card: "Stella, if you had a child out there, you could bring them home too, and they could inherit our assets in the future alongside Liam."

He dared to say this because, in our thirty years together, we had never spent more than a year apart. He was absolutely certain I couldn't possibly have a secret child.

Furthermore, I was fifty-seven years old. I was no longer capable of having children. They had planned this perfectly. Waiting until now to show up at my door was probably because they were afraid I might have changed my mind about being childfree earlier on.

But who can really say for sure when it comes to secret children?

Seeing my face darken, Thomas softened his tone to comfort me: "Stella, I admit I made a small mistake in my youth and wronged you. But we've weathered thirty years of storms together. How many years do we even have left? Besides, at our age, it's impossible to raise a child from scratch anyway. Liam has half my blood; his character can't be that bad..."

Perhaps he didn't even realize the smug, triumphant look plastered on his own face. Back then, he was the one who suggested being childfree. He said he didn't like kids, even claimed he had a physiological aversion to them.

I happened to dislike kids too, so we reached a childfree consensus.

Now, he had stabbed me in the back, only to turn around and mock me: Who told you to be so stupid and not guard against me?