As he said that, he took away the mic from the emcee.
Bethan and he walked to the center of the stage. He looked at the guests with his deep, dark eyes. “Hello, everyone. You were asking if I’d help Adrian to pay back the money he owed all of you. I said I’d deal with it.”
The crowd got excited.
“That’s right!”
“Are you going to pay US back now?”
“How are you going to pay? I’m all ears.”
“Let’s sign a contract!”
Comments were everywhere.
However, Brettley merely smiled indifferently.
“I said I’ll explain the situation, but I never said I’m going to pay for him. I hereby inform all of you that I will not be liable for any debts that Adrian Morrison owes…”
As he said that, he looked at Adrian and Jacqueline.
“The reason why I come back today is to cut ties with Mr. Adrian Morrison.”
What Brettley said created a ripple effect like when a stone got thrown into a peaceful lake. An uproar appeared among the crowd.
Some were worried Brettley was really serious about not helping with Adrian’s debt and they needed to go after Adrian. Some were guessing that something happened between Brettley and Adrian. Some even thought Brettley deliberately put on a show and lied about cutting ties with Adrian because he did not want to help with Adrian’s debt.
All kinds of assumptions and guesses appeared.
Bethan stood beside Brettley and grabbed his hand tightly. She knew to the others, Brettley looked powerful and mighty but he actually had a soft heart too.
He yearned for family bonding. He yearned for Adrian to love and care for him as every normal father would.
All these years, he had been trying to bear with Adrian no matter how Adrian hurt him over and over again. Otherwise, it just did not make sense that the only one in jail was Michael after Granny Morrison passed away when Adrian was also one of the masterminds.
Subconsciously, he wanted to give Adrian a chance to turn over a new leaf. Yet, this expectation was shattered into pieces after he found out the real reason for his mother’s death when he was in Saigen City.
Cutting ties with Adrian in the public was the same as revealing the real reason behind Rianna’s death to the public. It required determination and courage.
Bethan believed Brettley was determined and firm. Thus, she believed she should stand firmly beside him and go through everything together with him at this moment.
“Cut ties with me?”
The smile on Adrian’s face froze.
He looked at Brettley shockingly and he just could not believe his own eyes. “Brettley. I’m marrying Jacqueline today! What nonsense are you talking about?”
It also caught Jacqueline by surprise having to hear Brettley was cutting ties with Adrian as soon as he was back in the city. She panicked, “That’s right, Brettley. I mean you came back after getting our invitation. So you should be like the others, enjoy the wedding and also give us your blessing for getting married together. Why are you talking about this now?”
“That’s right! You’re ruining our day!”
Adrian talked confidently when Jacqueline was on his side.
A man in his fifties was actually standing behind a woman in her twenties. He grabbed her sleeves and cocked up his head like a kid.
“It’s my wedding today. We can talk after the wedding. So let’s find a time to sit down together to talk after the wedding, alright?”
“There’s nothing I want to talk to you about.”
Brettley curled his lips and gave Adrina a cold look.
Later he looked at the guests again. “You probably know that I don’t have a mother growing up with me. Mr. Adrian Morrison had told everyone that she died during labor.”
“I never know what it was like to have a mother growing up with me. Nor did I dare to ask about my mother. Every time i asked for my mother, Mr. Adrian Morrison would scold me and hit me. He said I’m a jinx. If my mother did not need to give birth to me, she won’t have to die.”
“For the last thirty years of my life, I always thought my mother died because of me. I lived in fear and never dared to cry or fuss like the other kids. I didn’t dare to say I want my mother because I think I was a sinner.”
“Until…”
He looked to the side and gave Adrian a cold glare, “Until I found the real reason that my mother’s death has nothing to do with me.”
Brettley’s statement made the entire room go silent as everyone gaped at the pair of men onstage.
Everyone in Banyan City knew that Rianna, the most powerful businesswoman in the city at one point, died due to complications during childbirth, and at that time, Adrian even hosted a memorial for her.
At her funeral, Adrian cried his heart out, claiming that Rianna was the most selfless woman he had ever met and that she had chosen to give up her life just to continue the Morrison bloodline.
This was why even after so many years, everyone in Banyan City was under the impression that Adrian and Rianna were a match made in heaven, and that if Rianna had not died, they would have spent the rest of their lives together, happily ever after. At this moment, however…
Brettley’s bold statement destroyed everyone’s impression.
“Mr. Morrison, you can’t frame your father with false accusations just to get out of paying our money back!”
All of a sudden, someone yelled from among the crowd.
The entire room seemed to fall silent once more.
After a brief pause, someone else shouted, “That’s right, Mr. Morrison. Are you and your father putting on another act just to get out of paying back your loans?
“First, you claim that you’re going to disown your father, and now, you’re accusing him of being the mastermind behind your mother’s death, instead of it being due to childbirth as previously claimed. Do you even have any evidence to support your claims?”
“Do you think we’ll believe you just like that?”
“He’s right-we’ll never believe you unless you show us concrete evidence!”
Bethan could not help furrowing her eyebrows when she heard the crowd beginning to protest.
After all, Brettley was, at one point, one of the most powerful men in the city, so she was surprised that when it came to a point that Brettley had become involved in a financial scandal, the people who had supported him in the past would turn on him.
“Of course I have evidence.”
Brettley curled his lips into a smirk as he swept his glance across the crowd, staring straight at the people who were questioning him. Then, he added coldly, “After all, I’m Adrian and Rianna’s son, and I’d be the last person willing to believe that my father has killed my mother.
“I would rather believe that my mother died while she was giving birth to me, and it’d be an easier pill to swallow than the idea that my father had killed his wife, but after seeing the cold, hard facts, there’s no doubt this is the truth.”
With that, Brettley sighed and took out his phone. “Let’s start.”
As soon as he finished his sentence, a white screen lowered down from behind the stage, and at the same time, Jude instructed a few backstage workers to wheel out a projector, the beam directed straight at the screen.
Bethan furrowed her brows when she saw this, then glanced at Brettley and asked in a voice barely above a whisper, “Since when did you arrange all this?”
Brettley curled his lips into a smirk. “I didn’t-it was Adrian who planned all this, I just borrowed it for a moment.”
Even though Adrian and Jacqueline’s wedding seemed like a ludicrous prank in everyone’s eyes, and Jacqueline had ulterior motives for marrying Adrian, he still could not help feeling proud of the fact that he had managed to convince a young woman into marrying a fifty-year-old man like him.
Therefore, Adrian requested specifically for a projector to be prepared, intending to showcase all of his and Jacqueline’s wedding photos for the public to admire. Brettley was just borrowing his setup for a bit.
However, instead of the wedding photos Adrian had prepared, the projector displayed a series of evidence portraying Adrian’s involvement in Rianna’s murder!
A copy of Rianna’s medical report while she was pregnant read that her pregnancy had been uneventful and that she could undergo normal vaginal delivery as planned.
However, it was Adrian who insisted on letting her go through a Cesarean delivery.
Besides that, the doctors also documented the fact that they had warned Adrian of the complications that could arise from a Cesarean delivery due to Rianna’s condition, and that the surgery came with a high risk of death, but Adrian did not waver.
On the day of Rianna’s surgery, she almost died on the table as the doctors predicted, but fortunately, her sister Eanne arrived at the scene just in time and managed to save her life.
Rianna was still alive up until this time, but the final medical report documented that she had died of surgical complications.
With that, a series of photos from Rianna’s funeral appeared onscreen, including pictures of Adrian crying as though he was a child who had lost his favorite toy.
However, on the same day, he and Celia spent the night at a hotel together, proven by the hotel’s records.
The final piece of evidence that appeared onscreen was a copy of the airline records, showing that Eanne and Rianna had left Banyan City together, back to their hometown Saigen City.
The crowd erupted into a flurry of murmurs and whispers at the shocking discovery, as everyone gaped at the screen.
Most of the elders still remembered Rianna’s funeral from many years ago, and it was one of the most memorable funerals in Banyan City’s history. Everyone remembered the day that Rianna Morrison, the most powerful woman in Banyan City, died, and how grief-stricken her husband had been.
All of a sudden, there was concrete evidence that all this was just a lie, and according to the airline records, Rianna was alive after giving birth.
Adrian and Celia’s hotel stay proved that Adrian’s grief was all just pretend, and he was not truly bothered by his wife’s “death” at all. The fact that he had spent the night with another woman on the day of his wife’s death meant that he surely did not have much love for her at all.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.