He Demanded I Deny His Daughter, So I Walked Away novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Stubs

Silvan's POV

The nurse's name was in the back of Lila's address book, in my sister's pencil, with a phone number that rang through to a machine.

I left a message on Wednesday night and drove to Stonington on Thursday anyway.

Her house sat on a lane behind the harbor, white clapboard with a garden gone to seed.

She opened the door before I knocked.

She was small and seventy or so, with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, and she looked at my face for a long time.

"You have her jaw," she said. "Come in. You'll eat something."

I ate a tomato sandwich standing in her kitchen, because there was no arguing with it.

"You're Lila Sanborn's brother," she said. "I wondered when someone would come."

"Someone else came before me?"

"Sit."

I sat.

She went into the hall closet and came back with a shoebox tied with kitchen string.

She put it on the table between us and didn't untie it.

"Your sister was the sickest person I ever saw who didn't act sick," she said. "She came to the clinic in a wig, and she asked me for one name. The donor for her daughter's eggs."

"You gave it to her."

"I broke a rule I'd kept for thirty years. I'd do it again." She folded her hands. "Two weeks after the funeral, a man in a very good coat came to see me. A lawyer. He wanted to know who else had asked, and who else knew."

"And you said?"

"Nobody. He thanked me. He said the Lila Sanborn Foundation was grateful for discretion."

She untied the string.

The box was full of check stubs, rubber-banded by year.

I turned one over.

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