PART 9 – THE LAWYER WHO KNEW EVERYTHING
The pages of the old photo album felt rough between my hands. The light from the desk lamp faintly illuminated the yellowed photographs of my early childhood. Photos of me as a little girl, smiling in my mother's arms. But on the page where the letter began, there was no photo to look at—only sentences written in a firm hand in my mother's script. “My dear daughter,” I continued reading, my heart beating in my throat.
“The man you married back then—the father of Daniel and Sofia—was not the person he claimed to be. I knew it from the very day he asked you to marry him. I tried to warn you, but you were so in love, so blind in believing his good intentions, that you refused to listen.” I still remembered that period vividly. My ex-husband, Mark. He had been charismatic, charming, and full of ambition.
But after our marriage, he had slowly transformed into a cold, manipulative man who isolated me from all my friends and told me I was good for nothing except housework. When I finally found the courage to divorce him, he took everything and left me with debts and two young children. But the letter continued with a revelation that shook my very foundations.
“Mark never truly disappeared from our lives, sweetheart. Even though you thought he went abroad after the divorce, he always remained in contact with Daniel and Sofia. In fact… it was Mark himself who recently pushed them to sell the house to settle his new illegal debts.” My blood ran cold in my veins. Mark? My ex-husband was behind all of this?!
He had used our children as pawns in a vendetta against me and my mother, because my mother had refused back then to lend him the money from the sale of her land. “If you want to know where Mark is now and how you can stop all of this forever,” was written at the bottom of the letter, “you must contact Attorney Van Dalen. He is the only one who knows the true dynamics of what happened and possesses the file that can expose Mark.” I closed the photo album.
My breathing was ragged. This was no longer an ordinary family feud; this was a war that had been going on for decades in the shadows. Early the next morning, I was already standing outside Attorney Van Dalen's office, long before the doors opened. I needed to know how deep this conspiracy went and how I could stop Mark once and for all. When the doors opened, I walked in and asked for the lawyer.
The secretary looked at me in surprise, but when I spoke my mother's name and showed her the note from the photo album, I was shown directly into his office. Attorney Van Dalen, an elderly man with a sharp gaze and a bald head, was waiting for me behind his desk. “Mrs. De Jong,” he said sternly, offering his hand. “Your mother strongly recommended that I deliver this file to you as soon as she was no longer with us. She knew the day would come when Mark would resurface.”
