Inherited Patterns

The papers were innocuous at first glance—bank statements tucked behind medical journals, a second phone in Kevin's golf bag, receipts from restaurants Amy had never visited. Drake Hoskins found them six weeks after the funeral while helping Amy sort Kevin's home office.

"Amy," Drake said, voice catching. "You should sit down."

She laughed, that brittle sound she'd perfected since becoming a widow. "What, did Kevin hide another mortgage? We're already at three."

Drake's trembling hand held out a marriage certificate. Singapore. Dated two days before Kevin's death. The bride's name: Melissa Lim.

Amy didn't scream. She simply folded, like origami in reverse, all her carefully creased edges coming undone.

Drake had known about Melissa for three years. He'd seen her first at the Bangkok conference, Kevin's research assistant with her pre-med background and hungry eyes. Kevin introduced her as "brilliant, absolutely brilliant," his hand lingering too long on her shoulder.

"She reminds me of Amy when she was young," Kevin had said over whiskey that night. "Before the kids. Before she got so domestic."

Drake wanted to punch him. Instead, he ordered another round.

The embezzlement started small—research funds redirected, conference budgets inflated. Drake watched Kevin transfer forty thousand here, sixty thousand there, always to accounts that traced back to Melissa if you looked hard enough. Which Drake did, late at night, building a file he never used.

"Why didn't you stop him?" Harper would ask years later, after learning his father had been complicit.

"Because I loved your mother," Drake would answer. "And I thought if Kevin left Amy for Melissa, I'd finally have my chance."

The truth was uglier: Drake kept quiet because Kevin owned him too. The company's patents, the ones that made them both rich? Half were Drake's designs with Kevin's name attached. Mutually assured destruction, Kevin called it. "We're bound together, old friend. Like brothers."

Brothers don't let brothers steal from their wives. But Drake did.

Three months after his father's death, Kieran discovered the intelligence files by accident. A routine security clearance review flagged unusual activity in Kevin's accounts. As a senior analyst, Kieran had access to financial tracking systems most people didn't know existed.

"Your father was being investigated," his handler informed him. "Suspected foreign asset transfers. The case was dropped when he died."

Kieran spent seventy-two hours without sleep, tracing every transaction. The money led to Singapore, to a woman named Melissa Lim, to a marriage certificate that made his mother's entire life a lie.

He called Alice from a secure line. "Dad was a bigamist."

"What?"

"And a thief. And possibly murdered."

Alice threw up in her office wastebasket, her eating disorder roaring back to life. She'd spent her whole life being the perfect daughter for a man who was perfectly corrupt. The beta blockers in her purse rattled as her hands shook. She'd hidden her therapy sessions, her anxiety, her eating disorder, all to maintain the image of stability her father demanded. Now she understood why he'd written "Alice needs stability" in the will's margin notes—projection from a man whose entire life was unstable.

That evening, Alice found the letters in their mother's jewelry box while searching for something blue for her wedding. Love letters, but not from Kevin. From Drake, dated across thirty years, never sent.

"My dearest Amy, I watched him miss your birthday again today. You deserve someone who sees you."

"Amy, he's stealing from the company. I have proof. But if I tell you, I'll lose you forever."

"Today you wore that green dress from our Harvard days. You're still the fiercest woman I know, even if Kevin has convinced you otherwise."

Alice confronted her mother that night, letters spread across the kitchen table like evidence.

"Did you know?" Alice demanded. "About Drake? About Dad?"

Amy's hands shook as she poured wine. "I knew Kevin didn't love me anymore. I didn't know he'd married someone else while I was spooning medicine into his mouth."

"And Drake?"

"Drake was the best friend who held Kevin's secrets better than he held his own heart."

Alice's therapist would later call this moment her "psychological break from the mythology of family." But that night, she just called it betrayal.

Gabby learned about the affair from Marek, of all people. Her ex-boyfriend called from Prague with information his company had uncovered during due diligence on the Mack corporation.

"Your boyfriend's father had investments in Singapore. With a woman."

Gabby hung up, but the damage was done. She googled Melissa Lim, found research papers co-authored with Kevin, photos from conferences where Melissa stood too close, smiled too bright.

When Kieran finally told her the truth—about the will, the debts, the complete house of cards—Gabby understood she wasn't just being asked to marry into a family. She was being asked to prop up a mythology built on lies.

"Your father created a will that forces marriage because his own was a sham," she told Kieran that night. "And you're following his pattern, pursuing me when you're not even sure if it's real or just convenient."

"It's real," Kieran insisted.

"How would you know?" Gabby asked. "Your entire model for love is a man who died married to two women, loving neither."

The words hung between them like a curse. Gabby thought of her grandmother in Prague, needing treatment she couldn't afford, of the beauty empire she was building with her bare hands, of the choice between love and survival that seemed to haunt every woman in this story.

Harper discovered his father's complicity the night of the rehearsal dinner, when Drake got drunk enough to confess.

"I helped Kevin hide everything," Drake slurred. "The affairs, the money, all of it. You know why? Because I'm a coward who loved his wife and hated myself for it."

Harper thought about his mother, Farrah, who'd found Drake's letters to Amy. Who'd swallowed pills that night, leaving a note: "I was never enough. Neither was Harper. Now you're both free."

"Mom died because of your obsession with Amy Mack," Harper said quietly.

"Your mother died because I couldn't be honest about anything, including who I was," Drake replied. "Just like you couldn't be honest about loving Kieran."

The parallel hit Harper like a physical blow. Both Hoskins men, destroying themselves and others rather than admit who they truly loved. Harper remembered the conversion therapy camp his father had sent him to at sixteen, eight months of having his love for Kieran electrocuted out of him. It hadn't worked. Nothing had worked. The love remained, twisted into bullying, then into anonymous donations to Kieran's agency, then into this moment of terrible recognition.

Amy started painting the day after she learned about Melissa. The first canvas was Kevin's portrait—half in light, half in shadow. She painted his smile with the same brush she used for his lies, mixing truth and deception until you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

Drake found her in the garage studio at 3 AM, covered in paint, surrounded by canvases depicting their entire forty-year history.

"This one," she said, pointing to a painting of a woman drowning in a wedding dress, "is our anniversary. The one he spent with Melissa."

"Amy—"

"This one is you, watching him betray me and saying nothing. See how your hands are full of papers you never showed me?"

Drake studied the painting. His painted self clutched documents—evidence, love letters, truth—all held uselessly at his sides. His Parkinson's tremor had started by then, though he hadn't told anyone. Five years, the doctors said. Five years to make amends for forty years of cowardice.

"And this one," Amy continued, moving to the largest canvas, "is all of us at Kevin's funeral, mourning a man who never existed."

In the painting, they stood around a casket filled not with a body but with shredded documents, fake receipts, and wedding rings—three of them, though Kevin only ever wore one.

The estate lawyer called it "complicated." With Melissa's marriage certificate, she could claim everything. The will Amy had been executing was potentially invalid. The company Kevin and Drake built might belong to a twenty-eight-year-old research assistant in Singapore.

"Unless," the lawyer said, reviewing Drake's files, "we can prove the marriage was fraudulent. Or that Ms. Lim was complicit in embezzlement. Or she agrees to disappear. For a price."

The number was ten million dollars. Drake paid it without hesitation.

"Why?" Amy asked him later.

"Because your children deserve better than the truth," Drake said. "They deserve the chance to build something real on top of all these lies."

Amy looked at him, this man who'd loved her silently for forty years, who'd watched her husband destroy everything while saying nothing.

"That's not your call to make," she said. "The truth is all we have left."

But even as she said it, Amy knew the truth was more complex. The truth was that she'd suspected Kevin's affairs but chose ignorance. That she'd pawned her jewelry to pay bills while maintaining the perfect widow facade. That she'd forced the will on her children not for love but for survival, using their marriages to save herself from bankruptcy.

In the end, what Kevin left them wasn't money or companies or houses with three mortgages. It was the weight of his secrets, distributed unevenly among those who survived him.

Amy inherited the rage, which she transformed into art that would later fill a gallery called "Inheritance: A Family Portrait."

Drake inherited the guilt, which he carried alongside his Parkinson's diagnosis like twin diseases eating him from inside.

Kieran inherited the paranoia, seeing patterns and deceptions everywhere, even in Gabby's love, his intelligence training turned inward until every relationship became suspect.

Alice inherited the eating disorder's resurgence, controlling her body when she couldn't control the truth, skipping dinners while planning a wedding built on sand.

Harper inherited the parallel, understanding that his father's complicity in Kevin's lies mirrored his own years of hiding, of pushing Kieran into lockers when he wanted to push him into walls and kiss him.

And Gabby—who hadn't even been family yet—inherited the choice: join this broken mythology or force them all to confront their truth.

The night before Alice's wedding, they gathered in Amy's studio. The paintings surrounded them like witnesses.

"We could tell everyone," Alice said. "At the wedding. Just lay it all out."

"We could pretend nothing happened," Kieran countered. "Keep Dad's reputation intact."

"We could each tell our own version," Harper suggested. "Let the truth be complicated."

Amy looked at Drake, whose trembling hand reached for hers. She thought about Eduardo, her tango instructor who'd taught her to move again after Kevin's death. About the gallery opening next month. About the choice between comfortable lies and uncomfortable freedom.

"Or," Amy said, "we could stop inheriting his choices and start making our own."

Gabby stood before the largest painting—the funeral scene with its casket full of lies. She thought of her grandmother in Prague, of the Estée Lauder offer that would save her company but cost her independence, of Kieran's proposal that came with love but also with all this wreckage.

"In Czech," she said, "we have a saying: Lež má krátké nohy. Lies have short legs. They can't run far or stand for long."

She turned to face them all—this family built on beautiful deceptions.

"Your father's lies have run their course. The question is: what truth will you build in their place?"

Kevin Mack had left them a substantial inheritance after all—the chance to be more honest than he'd ever been, more real than he'd allowed them to be, more whole than his fractured love had made them.

The skeletons were out of the closet now, dancing in the light of Amy's unflinching portraits. And somehow, that terrible freedom felt like the first real thing any of them had inherited in years.