She had questioned him back then about how much he remembered. But he denied knowing the details. Now…

Linda gave a bitter laugh, her eyes cold and accusing. “You lied to me. You know much more than you’re letting on, don’t you?”

Ernest kept his mouth shut, his jaw set.

“Answer me!” Linda, trembling with emotion, grabbed his jacket, her eyes wild and red. “Tell me the truth!”

There was no way for him to run from this now.

“That’s right.” Ernest squeezed his eyes shut, a heavy sigh slipping out before he spoke again. “The night you were with Robin… that was actually his and Elissa’s wedding night.”

Linda’s mouth fell open, shock freezing her in place. “Their wedding night? Then… what about Elissa? Where was she supposed to be?”

“Elissa, she spent that night with me.”

Eric’s face went pale, caught completely off guard.

If he was stunned, Linda was even more rattled. This content belongs to fin?novel.net

She stayed perfectly still, as if she had turned to stone, her eyes wide and unfocused.

Did she hear Ernest correctly?

He reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder.

“That night… I was with Elissa. I let you down. I let her down, too.”

His confession filled the room with a heavy silence. For a moment, time itself seemed to stop.

“What a joke!” Linda’s sudden laughter sliced through the tension, each syllable dripping with venomous sarcasm. “So, on her wedding night, Elissa abandoned her husband, allowed him to commit some violation, and then she herself brazenly crawled into your bed?”

“No.” Ernest’s brows knitted together as he shook his head firmly, the denial falling from his lips for what felt like the hundredth time.

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He expelled a weighted breath and lowered his voice to a confession.

“That night, I was drugged… She didn’t approach me willingly. It was me. I pulled her toward me in my altered state.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed beneath the skin of his throat as he wrestled with the difficult explanation. “She just… entered the wrong room by mistake.”

“What?” Linda froze, her expression crumbling into one of absolute bewilderment.

A barrage of revelations crashed into her consciousness like successive blows from a sledgehammer, shattering every assumption she had carefully constructed.

Fragments of his previous explanations suddenly reassembled in her mind with terrible clarity, causing her lips to quiver uncontrollably.

“That night, you were also… drugged?” she stammered. “So the child you share with Elissa… that’s the true origin?”

“Yes.” Ernest confirmed with a single, solemn nod, his eyes never leaving her face.

A brittle, hollow laugh escaped Linda’s throat as her features contorted with disbelief.

“So all this time, every accusation I hurled at you was baseless. You never betrayed me. What transpired between you and Elissa was merely a tragic accident, not some calculated affair?”

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