preferred to tell you this myself when you grew up, but it appears I never got the chance.
There are so many things you don’t know, things you wouldn’t have understood as a child. Let me begin with the most important, the truth of who I really am to you. Perhaps Gemma or Caitlin has already told you, though they promised me they wouldn’t, and it wasn’t in Gemma’s interests that you know. In any case, it’s time you did know, directly from me. My darling girl, I am not your grandfather as you were raised to believe. I am your father. I met a young woman in Washington in the late eighties, and we had an affair. When she discovered she was pregnant, she told me she simply couldn’t keep you, couldn’t accommodate a baby in her life. I wanted you very much, so I paid her to carry you to term and sign adoption papers to give you over to me. No, she didn’t extort me. She had a very sick mother she cared for and staggering medical bills, so she agreed. You will want to know your birth mother’s maiden name was Constance Riley. If you wish to find her, I can tell you she moved back to England, to Birmingham.
I was in public life, as you know, and I couldn’t let it be known I had adopted my own child, born out of wedlock. I didn’t want Gemma to be your mother, and I knew she would refuse in any case. So Caitlin and I decided she would be your mother and I would be your grandfather. I was certainly old enough. To be honest, Caitlin was hesitant, but once she saw you and held you as I had, she wanted you. Never doubt that, dearest.
Forgive me for the deception, but at the time I didn’t feel I had a choice. Giving you over to Caitlin was the best way forward for all of us. It kept you close to me, and my love for you only blossomed as the years passed. It wasn’t the same for Gemma, of course. She was against my plan, but I gave her no choice. If she wanted to keep running Clarkson United, she had to agree and accept being your grandmother. Our estrangement was complete from that point on.
Now let me tell you what happened in 1995. It has long since ceased to matter to most anyone, except maybe poor Miranda Elderby, but understanding it will soon matter a great deal to you. You see, for two years before Nate met and married Miranda, he and Gemma were lovers. Yes, I knew all about it but said nothing to either Gemma or Nate. Perhaps it’s my own conceit, but I believed Gemma took Nate as her lover to punish me for my own betrayal. To be honest, I didn’t care. As I said, she and I shared a business partnership by that time, nothing more. And Nate? I’d loved Nate since we were boys, loved him more than I’d ever loved Gemma, truth be told, and I would have forgiven him much more, and he me, I suspect. Fact is, when I found out he was sleeping with Gemma, I felt sorry for him because I knew he had to feel immense guilt, even though he knew the only thing tying Gemma and me together was the business. And yes, Nate knew of my affair with Constance Riley and about you.
Nate broke off his affair with Gemma when he married Miranda, a lovely young woman you would have liked very much. He fell in love, you see, for the first time in his life, and I understood, maybe I was even a bit jealous.
Then Nate’s luck ran out. I remember I warned him not to take on a particular client being tried for murder, told him it could end badly if he lost because of his client’s criminal family, but he didn’t listen. He lost the case because the evidence was too overwhelming. The family blamed him, of course. It did end badly for him, but not in the way any of us could have imagined.
His client’s family didn’t murder Nate, Rebekah. Gemma murdered him that long-ago afternoon on Dawg Creek. I’m quite sure of it. It’s true he’d been drinking, what with everything happening, and he told me he was going there to face off with Gemma, to tell her he was leaving the country with Miranda. Yes, he