Adrian's Guilt
Chapter 06 - Adrian's Guilt
Adrian didn't sleep that night, sitting alone in his childhood bedroom at the Bellamy estate, staring at the ceiling while the full weight of the security footage replayed itself over and over behind his closed eyes.
He thought about his father differently now, every memory of the past thirty-four years recontextualizing itself against footage he could never unsee, every business dinner, every holiday toast, every proud, paternal hand on his shoulder now carrying a specific, sickening question underneath it he'd never once thought to ask.
*How many other rooms. How many other women. How many years.*
He found his mother in the kitchen near dawn, unable to sleep herself, sitting at the counter with a cup of tea gone cold in front of her.
"I need to ask you something," Adrian said, sitting across from her. "And I need you to actually answer honestly, not manage me the way you manage everyone else in this family."
Rosalind's expression tightened, some old, careful defense mechanism visibly activating behind her eyes.
"Did you know," Adrian asked. "About Dad. About what he does to women in that study."
Rosalind was quiet for a long moment, and in that silence, Adrian felt his last small hope that this might somehow be a misunderstanding collapse entirely.
"I suspected," Rosalind said finally, her voice barely above a whisper. "For years. I told myself I was imagining things. I told myself the alternative was too enormous to actually be true."
"Mom," Adrian said, something breaking in his own voice now. "You filed assault charges against Bianca. This morning. While Dad was still unconscious. Did you know what he'd actually done to her, before you filed those charges."
Rosalind's hands trembled around her cold tea. "I filed them because that's what your father would have wanted, and because I've spent thirty-six years managing this family's image, and my first instinct, God help me, was still to protect that image instead of asking hard questions first."
"You need to withdraw them," Adrian said. "Immediately. There's security footage, Mom. From that study. Multiple incidents, going back years. This isn't a misunderstanding anymore."
Rosalind's face went pale, the specific horror of confirmation landing considerably harder than suspicion ever had.
"Multiple incidents," she repeated. "How many."
"Elias found four others," Adrian said. "Beyond Bianca. We don't even know yet who all of them are."
Rosalind's composure finally, completely shattered, tears falling freely as thirty-six years of careful, deliberate not-knowing collapsed under the direct weight of confirmed, documented truth.
"I need to withdraw the charges," she said, standing abruptly. "Today. Immediately. Adrian, I am so sorry, for tonight, for not asking harder questions years ago, for choosing this family's reputation over actually protecting the people inside it."
Adrian watched his mother's genuine, devastated grief with a complicated mixture of sympathy and a specific, lingering anger he wasn't yet ready to fully release.
"I need you to do more than withdraw the charges," he said. "I need you to actually help us figure out who else this happened to, and I need you to be honest, completely honest, about anything else you might have suspected or witnessed over the years, even if it implicates you in years of looking away."
May you like
Rosalind nodded, tears still falling, and for the first time since the ballroom, Adrian felt something that resembled, faintly, the possibility of his family actually choosing truth over comfortable silence, even this late, even after so much damage had already been done.
"I'll help however I can," Rosalind said. "I owe that to Bianca. I owe it to whoever else he's hurt. I think I owe it to myself too, honestly, after years of pretending I didn't already know."
