Seven Years, One Lie: My Fiancé's Secret Family

The first birthday I spent with Nathan Sanchez was in an old brownstone row-house block.

I was carrying a heavy chamber pot out to the public toilet at the mouth of the alley to empty it.

My father, the professor, had put a notice in the paper cutting all ties between us.

Nathan folded that paper into a hat, sang "I'm a house-painter man" deliberately off-key, and painted over the moldy walls as he went.

By our second birthday together, we'd moved into a one-bedroom with its own bathroom.

Nathan had just had surgery on a polyp on his vocal cords, and the doctor ordered him to stay silent for two weeks after.

Instead, to make rent, he livestreamed for twenty hours straight.

Then came our seventh birthday together.

I'd booked out the whole movie theater well in advance, planning to marry myself off to him on his birthday.

That day I was working at the airport, on duty escorting unaccompanied minors.

I found myself staring blankly at the little girl's name tag:

Beatrice Sanchez

What a coincidence. There really were people in the world with the exact same name.

Back then, if the child Nathan and I had made had been born, she would have been called that too.

The little girl chirped into her phone watch:

"Daddy! Beatrice is on a plane to come celebrate your birthday!"

A weary voice came from the other end:

"My clever girl."

"But no flying alone from now on, okay? It isn't safe."

My breath stopped for a few seconds. That voice in the phone watch left me a little dazed.

For no reason I thought of Nathan.

He'd said the same thing to me last night:

"My clever girl. One more time, okay?"

...

I sat alone in the theater.

I kept checking my phone, kept turning to look behind me.

Until the closing song began, and a silent image flashed up on the big screen:

Nathan Sanchez, let's get married!

The words were like a black-and-white silent film.

In the silence, I heard my heart give two slow beats.

The stall door beside the restroom answered my heartbeat, two clicks, click-click.

Sobbing came from inside:

"Mommy..."

I rushed to teach her:

"Sweetie, don't be scared. Turn the lock to the left."

Click.

Behind the door was a soft little round face.

"Auntie?" Beatrice recognized me.

What a coincidence.

"Where's your mommy?" I took her hand to go find her guardian.

"Mommy went to call Daddy. My daddy... is busy at work."

"Don't worry. Auntie will help you find her."

The crowd surged through the theater.

"What are you doing snatching my child!"

The woman's shriek had barely reached my ear when a security guard seized my arm.

A biting pain shot through me.

The world spun, my arms were wrenched behind my back, and I was slammed down hard against the floor.

The woman ground the point of her high heel into my face.

"Human traffickers these days are so brazen! One second I turn away, and she nearly makes off with my child!"

Beatrice was frozen stiff by the scene.

Her mouth crumpled, and all she could do was wail.

Those two words, "human trafficker," set the watching crowd alight.

They pulled out their phones, aimed them at my twisted face...

"I didn't! Your child got locked in by the bathroom door! I only helped her open it out of kindness!"

"Check the security footage!"

The woman rolled her eyes at me.

"You knew exactly there's no camera in the bathroom!"

The mood turned frenzied.

To all those parents with children, I was a monster.

How was this any different from helping up an old person and getting accused for it?

I broke free of the grip and reached for my phone on the floor.

The woman's heel came down on it, and the screen cracked into a spiderweb.

"You still have the nerve to call the police?"

Beatrice dialed for reinforcements.

She didn't speak, only whimpered.

A familiar voice came from the watch:

"Don't be scared, baby. Daddy's coming!"

The security guards locked me in the farthest stall of the men's room.

The stall was falling apart from years of neglect.

A broken toilet, a rotting mop head, dirty water dripping from the ceiling.

"Where is she?"

"Locked up in there. Should we call the police?"

"Don't worry, leave it to me. Go comfort Beatrice, she's terrified."

Clack.

The stall door opened.

Something roared in my head.

Slowly, I looked up.

Nathan Sanchez was standing in the stall doorway.

He frowned faintly, unruffled, and looked at me.

"Why are you here?"

A few drops of dirty water slid down from my temple into my collar, and I came back to myself in the shock of it.

"Nathan, I should be asking you that."

A child's sobbing came from outside.

"Daddy"

Nathan glanced at me and tossed out one line, "Go on back first."

Then he walked away without looking back.

He told the security guards it was a misunderstanding.

The one locked in the restroom wasn't a kidnapper. She was his girlfriend.

Nathan lifted the child out of Imogen Perez's arms.

The onlookers felt even sorrier for Imogen.

Their eyes settled on my face, solid as touch.

That one line of his nailed me to the pillory for good.

As if I, the "girlfriend," were the mistress wrecking the happy life of a family of three.

"Mr. Sanchez, I'm sorry," Imogen said in a small voice.

"Take Beatrice home first."

"I have to apologize to your girlfriend."

Imogen turned to me.

"Miss Cannon."

"Beatrice went missing, and I was frantic. I mistook you for a kidnapper"

In the mirror I saw Nathan pinch Beatrice's cheek.

"Go home now, baby. Daddy will come be with you later."

"No!" Beatrice said loudly. "I want to sleep with Mommy and Daddy!"

"Beatrice, we can't do that"

A flush spread across Imogen's face, and she stole a glance at Nathan.

I turned my face and looked at myself in the mirror.

Cracked, dry lips. The side of my face swollen and red.

The guard set my cracked-screen phone on the sink counter.

"We didn't do that to your phone!"

I didn't want to stay a second longer. I picked up the phone and walked out fast.

The floor-to-ceiling glass threw back a lonely figure.

"Olympia."

Nathan came after me.

I turned my still-swollen left cheek away from him.

At the edge of my vision, Nathan pulled off his tie and wound it around his hand.

Deflated, undone.

Seven years ago, when I broke with my family, he'd worn the same look.

"When did it happen?" I asked, watching him steadily.

I wasn't afraid of losing him.

I only wanted to give the girl I'd been for the last seven years an answer.

He kept drawing breath, his lips moving several times, and in the end he said it.

Five years ago he'd been at dinner with a few executives from a partner company.

At the table, one of them got Imogen drunk on purpose.

He wanted to take her up to the executive suite on the floor above.

Nathan couldn't stand by and watch, so he took the unconscious Imogen away.

"Olympia, I swear! It was only that one time!"

He grabbed my hand, desperate.

His tone was exactly like the words he'd said back when I broke with my father, when he knelt outside my family's door.

"Sir, I swear! I'll earn good money! I won't let Olympia suffer with me!"

Seven years.

He had done it, no question.

A watch worth millions, custom suits, a villa in the heart of the city.

His company became one of the biggest taxpayers around.

But all he'd done was make money.

"Olympia, I was wrong."

Nathan closed his hand around my two fingers, the signal we'd agreed on long ago for making up.

"Don't leave me."

"Beatrice is only four. She snuck onto a plane by herself to celebrate my birthday."

"I heard you were the one who picked her up, right?"

"All these years, I've only ever sent her gifts and put money in her New Year's cards."

I lifted my head and looked at him.

"Just responsibility?"

Nathan nodded.

"I'm her biological father. I do my duty by her, and my conscience is clear."

His phone rang all at once.

He held the screen up in front of me.

"It's the driver calling, no one else."

The moment he answered, the driver's frantic voice came through.

"Mr. Sanchez, the little girl's running a high fever and she keeps crying for her daddy"

Nathan didn't hesitate for a second.

He walked out without looking back.

I sat there and watched him go, farther and farther away.

So this was his choice.

The pain worked its way into my veins, and I sat alone on the living room couch through the whole night.

Just before dawn, a text finally pinged through with a location:

The city children's hospital.

Not one word more.

The living room was piled with shopping bags of children's clothes.

The housekeeper came to me.

"Mr. Sanchez had these sent over."

My eyes landed on the designer logo across the bags, and something in me went sour.

I dug out the suitcase I'd taken seven years ago, the day I ran from home.

Then I opened the safe and took out my documents.

At the very bottom, pressed flat, was a set of baby clothes.

Back when I was pregnant, I'd fallen for it the moment I saw it.

Nathan hadn't said a word, just pulled out his credit card.

"It's for our baby. Of course it should be the best."

That designer baby outfit ended up staying in the display window.

I secretly bought this knockoff instead, a few dollars' worth.

That child.

In the end, that child never came into the world.

While I was pregnant, I couldn't bring myself to buy even one thing.

Now he'd cleared out an entire counter for another child.

Before long, the housekeeper spoke again.

"There's an older gentleman downstairs waiting for you."

"Who?" I closed the suitcase.

"He said his name is Cannon."

I walked to the top of the stairs in a daze and looked down.

Just then he tipped his face up.

"Dad"

That word, "Dad," I hadn't said in seven years.

He was thinner than before.

When he cut ties with me, he'd been a solid, healthy middle-aged man.

In the space of a blink, he'd become an old man with gray at his temples.

His hands shaking, he opened his phone and held up a photo.

Nathan holding a little girl who looked eighty percent like him.

"If Otis hadn't told me, I wouldn't even have known you'd had a child."

"Dad, you've got it wrong." My throat was dry. Where was I even supposed to begin?

He took off his glasses awkwardly and wiped the corner of his eye.

"I acted rashly back then. Olympia, I'm sorry."

As the words left him, the front door of the villa suddenly opened.

The little girl from the photo came bursting in, like she'd stepped straight out of the screen.

"Daddy says all these new clothes are for Beatrice!"

Her pale-yellow dress swirled at the hem as she darted into the pile of bags like a little butterfly.

The floor was covered in the designer children's clothes I'd never let myself buy.

Nathan had made it now, and his other child had cleared out an entire counter.

It was as though some invisible knife was coming down on my heart, stroke after stroke.

My father crouched down and stroked her little head with an affection I remembered.

"Little one, what's your name?"

"Beatrice Sanchez."

Beatrice answered, then stared straight at me.

"Auntie, why are you at my daddy's house?"

That one line woke me out of the dream.

My father froze for a moment.

"Beatrice, what did you just call her?"

"Auntie. She's not my mommy."

My father looked like he'd been struck by lightning, staring at me in disbelief.

At that moment, the keypad lock on the villa door beeped a few times.

A young woman burst in, her face taut and flushed.

"Beatrice! What are you doing running off, your mommy and daddy have been looking everywhere for you!"

The villa door stood wide open.

My father put his glasses back on with trembling hands.

At last he saw clearly the man and woman standing side by side in the doorway.

Nathan stood tall and composed, not a ripple in his eyes.

"Mildred, we have a guest. Why aren't you seeing to him?"

He called his father-in-law "a guest."

My father looked around him.

On the wall hung our travel wedding photos, the two of us riding a hot-air balloon in Turkey.

In the living room stood Nathan, Imogen Perez, and their child.

The housekeeper poured tea with practiced ease.

Nathan pressed a hand to Imogen's shoulder and soothed her. "Don't panic. I'll handle it."

The little girl busy trying on clothes carried the Sanchez name, but she wasn't mine.

"Dad, I" My mouth opened.

So even trying to explain was laughable now.

My father roared.

"Olympia Cannon, is this the 'good life' you left home for, that you were so determined to run away and have?"

I caught myself against the wall, unsteady.

His question cut into me like a blade, splitting my chest open and stirring everything inside.

All that love I'd once burned with had turned to rotting flesh, festering, breeding pale maggots.

All at once, so much of my life felt like it had nothing left to reach for.

Seven years ago, Nathan knelt outside my family's door for a long time.

It didn't win my father's approval.

Seven years later, he hid himself in silence, like a total bystander.

No longer defending me. No longer stepping into my family matters.

I don't know how my father left.

I only remember Imogen, Beatrice's hand in her left, shopping bags in her right.

Like the lady of the house, she walked straight to the pink Bentley and got in.

"Miss Cannon, Beatrice's fever just broke. She can't be out in a draft."

"I'll just borrow Mr. Sanchez's car for a bit~"

I yanked the door open and grabbed her by the collar.

"Get out! This is my car!"

Before I could put any strength into it, my scalp screamed with pain.

Nathan wrenched me away.

Not even in my worst dreams.

The man who'd knelt outside my family's door seven years ago, begging my father.

Seven years later, he shoved me away, hard and cold, to protect another woman.

I lurched sideways, my head slamming straight into the car window.

My ears rang for a long time.

Nathan helped Imogen up.

She rubbed her wrist, and the corners of her eyes went red in an instant.

"Mildred Lambert, take Imogen to ice that, quick."

Then it was just the two of us in the garage.

That Bentley was the car Nathan had given me to get around.

Afraid it was too flashy, I'd never once driven it to work.

The beautiful custom paint job now carried several long scratches.

And in it I could see my own face, gray as dead ashes.

Hatred sat on Nathan's face.

"I didn't expect your father to show up. Things are messy enough already. Why can't you let it go?"

I looked up and saw a clump of my hair still clenched in his palm.

"Just now, in front of my father, you made it even more humiliating for me!" I screamed at him.

"Oh, please." Nathan sneered. "Seven years of nothing, not a word, and the old man thinks he's got a granddaughter, so he comes rushing over to claim family."

My scalp throbbed, and I couldn't tell whether it was the wound or the knife in the back from the man I loved.

"Daddy, Mommy said someone was bullying her, so she took a taxi and left. Is Mommy going to be okay?"

Beatrice peeked timidly through the side door.

Nathan scooped the child up and soothed her.

"How could Daddy bully Mommy? Come on, let's go find Mommy first."

"But Daddy," Beatrice lifted her head from Nathan's shoulder and said, word by word, "the one who bullied Mommy was the aunty."

Nathan stood at the top of the stairs and gave me a cool sidelong glance.

"You have to apologize to Imogen."

"Nathan, she was the one who started it"

I stepped forward twice, up onto the stairs, wanting to reason with him.

He turned aside to shield Beatrice.

Bang. The garage door shut out every sound.

My foot met empty air, and my body lost its balance.

The world spun.

I tumbled all the way down the stairs.

My lower abdomen slammed hard into the corner.

My phone screen flickered on.

*Sanchez Media Founder's Four-Year-Old Daughter Revealed for the First Time*

*Nathan Sanchez's Secret Marriage and Hidden Daughter*

Warm liquid slid down between my legs.

The pain crashed over me, and in despair, I closed my eyes.