He Took the Fall for Her Lover, So Now He Takes Everything novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Pedestrian

Cal sat up on the cot.

The blanket slid off his shoulders and he did not pull it back.

"Say it," he said.

Kira turned from the window.

She was holding her cane in both hands, the new rubber tip against the floor, and her knuckles were white.

"Three years and eight months ago," she said, "I worked nights as a pastry cook on Lorain Avenue. I got off at one in the morning and walked home down Larch Street."

Cal went still.

"I was wearing a blue wool coat. My mother had bought it for me."

He thought of three strands of blue fiber in a broken headlamp.

"A silver car came up behind me very fast," Kira said. "I didn't hear it. I woke up on the road with my hip broken in two places and my left leg turned the wrong way."

"Kira."

"Let me finish. If I stop, I won't start again."

He closed his mouth.

"The car stopped thirty feet away. The driver's door opened and a man leaned out and looked back at me. I saw his whole face under the streetlight."

Her voice did not shake.

"It was Preston Ridgway. I knew him from the society pages. He stood there and looked at me for maybe five seconds, and then he got back in and drove away."

"You were the woman."

"I am the woman you went to prison for hitting."

The room was very quiet.

Cal heard the heater tick, and a truck pass on the street below.

"Lawyers came to my hospital room before the police did," Kira said. "Gerald Ridgway's firm. They brought a paper. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, in exchange for my silence. I had no savings. I couldn't walk. I owed the hospital sixty thousand dollars before I'd had my second surgery."

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