The Unfaithful Husband’s Scheme

In the weeks following the surgery, I moved in almost entirely with the Ashworths to help care for them, bringing Lily along.
The old house in Elmsworth, spacious but always missing warmth whenever Julian was away on long business trips, was now full of the laughter of a five-year-old running about the garden, and lively conversation over every dinner.

I learned to make the classic beef stew Edmund loved, read the paper with him each morning while he did his arm physiotherapy, took Margaret to her regular check-ups, and spent every evening talking with the two of them about everything under the sun, from the weather to old memories.

Every morning, I sat beside Edmund as he did the physiotherapy exercises prescribed by his doctor, counting the rhythm as he lifted his weakened arm, encouraging him whenever he grew discouraged by the slow pace of recovery.
“You don’t have to do this, Evelyn,” he said once, a note of guilt in his voice, “you still have Lily to look after, and your own work.”
“Dad,” I replied, still keeping the steady count, “looking after you is my job too, not a burden. I want to do this.”
He looked at me for a long moment, something like a father’s pride flickering in his aged eyes.

One evening, as I folded laundry in the living room, Margaret came in, sat beside me, and after a moment of silence, spoke.
“Evelyn, you know, from the time Julian was a boy, he was always the most spoiled child in the family. Perhaps that’s why he grew up believing everything was simply owed to him, even other people’s love.”

I listened quietly, without interrupting her.

“We were wrong,” she went on, her gaze distant, “wrong not to teach him to value what he had. And you, you’re the one we never treated well enough, and yet you’re the one who stayed to care for us in our hardest moment.”

I took her hand. “Don’t say that, Mum. I’ve thought of you both as my own parents for a long time now.”

That was the truth, even if there had been calculation at the beginning, but over time, the line between plan and genuine feeling had gradually blurred inside me.
I truly loved these two people, who had given me a warmth their own son never deserved to inherit.

Not everyone in the family viewed my devotion kindly.
Aunt Beatrice, Edmund’s younger sister, during one visit, pulled Margaret aside into a corner of the kitchen to whisper something, but her voice carried loud enough that I heard it passing through the hallway.
“Don’t you find it strange? A daughter-in-law abandoned by her husband, looking after his family this devotedly. Watch out, she’s after your assets.”

I froze behind the door, my heart pounding, but didn’t step in to confront her.

That night, I heard Edmund raise his voice at his sister in the living room. “Beatrice, you have no right to say that about Evelyn. For eight months, she’s been the one taking me to every check-up, the one who stayed at the hospital all night during my surgery, while my own son couldn’t even be bothered to answer a phone call. If you say something like that in this house again, you needn’t come here anymore.”

I stood tucked behind the kitchen door, my eyes stinging, not from hurt at Aunt Beatrice’s words, but moved by Edmund’s unhesitating defence of me.
It was the first time I felt with complete certainty that I had truly become an inseparable part of this family, not through calculation, but through everything I had quietly done, day after day.

Edmund, as he continued to recover, began to notice more and more how I cared for the family.
He had been a retired civil engineer with many old connections in London’s urban planning circles, and he wasn’t a man who trusted easily.
But he watched me, every day, without a single complaint, shouldering everything that should rightly have been his son’s responsibility.

Some late afternoons, once Lily had gone to sleep and Margaret was busy with housework, Edmund and I would sit out on the porch, and he would tell me about his younger days, about buildings he’d helped design all across London, about Julian as a boy, once a timid child, afraid of the dark, who needed a nightlight on for years.
“I don’t know how he grew up to become this,” he sighed, his gaze fixed on the clouds turning orange in the fading light.
I didn’t know how to comfort him, so I simply rested a hand on his shoulder, letting him know he didn’t have to bear that disappointment alone.

“You know,” he said to me one afternoon as I pushed his wheelchair around the garden, “the council has just officially announced the Elmsworth redevelopment project. Our house is in the compulsory purchase zone, we’ll be compensated.”

I stopped walking and looked at him. “Really? Is the compensation significant, Dad?”

“Not small at all,” he smiled, something deep and unreadable in his eyes. “And I’ve made up my mind, Evelyn. That money, I want it to go to you and Lily.”