“I loved my wife,” he told the reporter, eyes shining. “I believed we were building a family together. To lose her and then be attacked in this way by people who want to rewrite our life… it’s devastating.”
The reporter nodded sympathetically.
Grant continued. “I made mistakes in my marriage. I won’t deny that. But I loved those babies from the second I knew they existed.”
Dorothy switched off the television halfway through and sat very still.
The phrase lodged in her mind: those babies.
Not Margot. Not Bridget. Not Theodore.
Those babies.
He was already distancing himself from what he could no longer fully control.
By the next morning, the clip had gone online and spread fast.
At first the comments split cleanly into two camps. One group pitied Grant: poor widower, betrayed by donor deception, hounded by a controlling mother-in-law. The other group asked harder questions: if he loved his wife, why had his mistress moved in almost immediately? Why the forged insurance documents? Why the stolen inheritance? Why the second phone?
The internet, Dorothy learned, was ugly but efficient.