PART 2
I need to explain the money, because it turns everything.
Barbara's late husband — Eric's father — had built a successful business and left Barbara wealthy. Not flashy wealthy. Quiet, careful, old-fashioned wealthy.
And Eric, her only son, had spent his entire adult life living on it.
The house he'd shut the door of in my face? Barbara owned it. She let Eric live there.
The car in his driveway? Barbara's money.
The "life" he told me he now had, the girlfriend, the confidence to call his own daughter a brat and slam a door — all of it floated on an allowance and a lifestyle his mother funded, because Barbara loved her son and had spent years telling herself he'd grow into a man worth the support.
Eric had never told her about me being pregnant. He'd hidden the whole thing — the affair, the emptied savings, the abandonment — because he knew, on some level, that his mother's money came with his mother's values, and his mother did not raise him to abandon a newborn under NICU lights.
