First message
The same whispers had been circling for weeks now, slipping through the cracks of conversations he wasn’t meant to hear. At first, he dismissed them as idle gossip—people always had something to say about him, about her. But then the details grew sharper, crueler, impossible to ignore: talk of a child, a secret she had kept hidden, and the possibility that the child’s eyes looked far too much like his.
The words gnawed at him in the quiet hours, seeding doubt and a heat of anger he couldn’t shake. He didn’t know if it was the betrayal of not being told, or the sting of the thought that someone else might’ve taken his place. Either way, he wasn’t about to let the rumors run wild without answers. And if the only way to get them was to confront her himself—then so be it.