CHAPTER 228

“Your brothers and sister?”

“Yep. He bribed a government official and the verdict handed down decreed we had to sell the homestead that’d been in my family for seven generations.” He closed his eyes.

“I never once thought about cheating my siblings out of any money and they made me feel so…dirty for everything I was. Everything I thought they’d accepted about me. I lost my mother, my ancestral home, my family, and my…dignity.”

“Edgard—”

“The final cut was when my stepfather told everyone in my hometown selling had been my idea because I wanted to live in Sao Paulo with my male lover. I became a pariah. The church forbade me from even visiting my mother's grave.”

She couldn’t speak.

“So see. I know about difficult family issues. I’ve lost everything that ever mattered to me.”

Except Trevor.

Edgard didn’t say it; he didn’t have to.

Her heart seemed to shatter into a billion pieces. That’s why Edgard had come back.

Not to steal Trevor away, but to remind himself of something that’d been