Never Judge

"Things didn\'t exactly happen like we told you." Raphael Chan began to say when Miguel finally calmed down. 

All the dads had a sad expression on their faces as Raphael Chan confessed to lying to his children and their friends.

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"Which parts exactly?" Eric asked as he crossed his arms over his chest and glared at his father.

"It wasn\'t your grandfather that asked your uncle Miguel to come back." Raphael Chan said with a sigh. "It was me."

"Seriously dad!" Nicole said angrily, standing up.

Ian reached over and held her hand, massaging her wrist to calm her down.

"Let\'s hear him out first, Nicole." Ian said as he tried to get her to sit back down and listen. "You can\'t be angry, it\'s bad for you." Ian said as he subtly reminded her that she was pregnant. 

Nicole took a deep breath and sighed. She took a seat and closed her eyes as she calmed her temper. She couldn\'t believe that it had been her father that forced her Uncle Miguel to come home.

"Dad, how could you?" Eric finally asked. "He had a wife, a kid, a life." 

"I didn\'t ask him to come back because of the reasons you think." Raphael Chan said with a frown as he observed his children\'s expressions.

"Then why did you ask him to come back?" Miguel asked. "I\'m sure you knew that grandpa would do anything and everything to separate him and his wife, and still you asked him to come back. Him being with them was the only thing protecting them."

"I thought I had changed my father\'s and the elder\'s minds." Raphael Chan confessed. "They told me that Miguel, his wife, and his child would be welcomed back with open arms if he came back and worked for the family for a year."

"So you convinced him?" Cedric asked.

"It wasn\'t that easy." Raphael Chan said with a sigh. "I didn\'t even know where he went."

"So how did you find him?" Miguel asked.

James Abad laughed at Miguel\'s question, earning him curious looks from their children.

"It wasn\'t your dad that found him, Miguel." James Abad said with a sad smile. "It was my wife and I, Victoria. She and I had gone abroad when we couldn\'t conceive and we pretended that she got pregnant while we, well, adopted Ram."

The girls all gasped at James\' Abad\'s revelation, it was only the boys and Veronica that knew that Ram was adopted. Everyone else had no clue.

"Is it true?" Katerina asked Ram as she looked at him from across the table.

Ram smiled and nodded. 

"I may not be an Abad by blood, but my parents have raised me as their own. I love them, and as much as I would like to meet my birth parents, mom and dad will always be my real parents." Ram said as he looked over to his father, James Abad, who was smiling proudly at him.

"Yeah, sure, forget me." Veronica teased as she rolled her eyes at him.

"Of course you will always be my favorite sister." Ram said as he winked at Veronica who smiled back at him.

"I did try to look for them, in case you guys were wondering." Ram said with a shrug. "I just couldn\'t find them."

"To us, you will always be the same annoying person." Cedric teased, making everyone laugh.

"So how did you find Uncle Miguel, dad?" Ram asked, eager to change the topic.

"We were in Italy, and I spotted him with his wife and their little son." James Abad explained. "At first I didn\'t approach them, I didn\'t want to scare Miguel off. He knew I was quite close with his older brother and that Raphael was looking for him. Eventually Raphael and Emilio visited us in Italy where we had been staying for over a year."

"I told James that the Chan elders were willing to let Miguel back into the family, I explained the situation and he arranged for us to meet." Raphael explained. "When I saw him I was so happy, it was also the first time I was seeing my nephew."

"What was his name?" Miguel asked, he just realized that they never asked what name his Uncle Miguel had given his son.

"Andrew Chan." Raphael said with a sad smile as he remembered his nephew\'s name. "He was a quiet baby, but he was smart. We were so excited to introduce him to all of you, we knew you would get along with him and Miguel wanted his son to grow up around his cousins, his family. So my brother agreed to come home."

"That\'s when everything went bad." Jose Sebastian said with a sigh as the other dads nodded in agreement.

"Back then you couldn\'t just do a video call, you needed to call with a landline." Raphael Chan explained. "My brother would call his wife and son everyday without fail, then dad started giving him more and more work, meaning he got to call less and less."

"To protect Andrew, we suggested that Miguel tell a little white lie and say he had a daughter and not a son." Emilio Reyes explained. "We had hoped that that fact would make it difficult for his wife and child to be found, but we were wrong."

"I should have stayed with them." James Abad said, shaking his head. 

"There was no way you could have known James. None of us knew." Raphael said as he placed a hand on his friend\'s back.

"It was while my brother was busy that my dad and the elders decided to do something about his wife." Raphael said with a frown. "They had chased his wife and son out of their home forcing them to flee in the middle of terrible weather."

"That\'s how Andrew and his mother died. Because the Chans were so selfish that they didn\'t care about their own flesh and blood." James Abad hissed at the memory. 

"The boat sank, James helped me recover the body and bury my brother\'s family." Raphael said with a frown. "My father forbade me from telling Raphael the truth. I never told him the truth, Raphael got a falsified letter one day saying his wife had ran away with a man taking his child with her."

"The letter only said child? Not son? Not daughter?" Eric asked.

"It said child, had it said daughter then my brother would have known something was wrong." Raphael said as he frowned and took a deep breath. "A few days later I found my brother, he was hanging in his room having taken his own life."

"Dad. . ." Nicole said as she reached out to her father.

"We were hoping that the baby\'s body that we found was not Andrew\'s, but we looked everywhere, we used all of our resources." Emilio Reyes said with a shrug. "Of course a DNA test was done, but the technology at that time was not as sophisticated so there was still a big chance for the results to have been wrong."

"We did everything we could, but in the end, Andrew Chan was dead, and my brother was gone as well." Raphael Chan told them as tears began to fall from his eyes,