I Wouldn't Take Their Daughter's DUI, So I Healed the Man She Crippled novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Gate

Edgar, Joanne and Bree come to the gate with cash and tears; Wynne refuses them in front of Lorne's staff, and Lorne stands unaided for a breath.

By the second afternoon I had learned where everything was in Cold Harbor House.

The gate was at the bottom of a long gravel drive, and the intercom beside it began buzzing at three o'clock.

The sergeant answered it, listened, and looked up at me from the kitchen doorway.

"There's a couple and a young lady at the gate for you, ma'am," he said. "The gentleman says he's your father."

"He isn't," I said.

I went down the drive with my sleeves still rolled from the colonel's session.

The sergeant and the cook came behind me without being asked.

Edgar stood on the far side of the iron bars in his good gray coat.

Joanne was beside him with her handkerchief out, and Bree stood a little behind them with red eyes.

"Wynne, sweetheart," Edgar said. "Thank God. We've been out of our minds."

"How did you find me?" I asked.

"You told the clinic where you were going," Joanne said. "Our girl, you can't walk out on people who love you."

"You put me out with one suitcase," I said.

"We were all upset." Edgar reached through the bars with a thick white envelope. "Take this. It's twenty thousand. It's the wages you should have been getting, and we'll talk about the rest."

I looked at the envelope and did not take it.

"All I have to do is sign the paper," I said.

"It's one signature." He lowered his voice, though the sergeant and the cook could hear every word. "A misdemeanor, community service, and then the money, and the house, and your room back."

"My room was the sewing closet," I said.

Bree began to cry in earnest.

"Please, Wynne," she said. "I can't go to jail. I'll die in there. You know what I'm like."

"I do know," I said.

I looked at the girl who had slept in the biggest room of the house for twenty-two years, and I thought about a man in a library with a leg that shook.

"A man might never walk again, Bree," I said. "Because of the third."

"Then it was an accident," she said.

"Then say that. In a courtroom, with your own name."

Her mouth opened and nothing came out.

Joanne's face hardened.

"After everything we've done for you," she said. "We fed you. We clothed you. We took you in when nobody wanted you."

"You took me in," I agreed. "You never paid me, and you never asked me before you decided what I owed."

Edgar's smile slipped.

"If you stay in that house," he said, quietly, "you'll find out how little you have."

"Then I'll find it out," I said. "The answer was no at the dinner table and it's no at the gate."

I turned and walked back up the drive.

Behind me I heard the car doors, and the engine, and the gravel spitting.

The colonel was waiting on the terrace at the top of the drive, on his two canes.

He had watched the whole thing from forty yards away.

"Who were they?" he asked.

"The people I used to work for," I said. "They wanted me to lie for them."

"About what?"

"About something I won't do." I held his gaze. "That's all I'll say about it, Colonel."

He did not push.

For a long moment he only studied my face, and I saw him decide something.

"Good," he said.

It was one word, and it was the first thing anyone had said in my favor in years.

"Now," I said, because I could not stand there with it any longer. "It's four o'clock. Put the canes down."

"I'm not ready."

"You'll never be ready. That's how it works. Put the canes against the wall."

He leaned them against the stone balustrade one at a time.

I stood in front of him with my hands held out an inch from his hips and not touching.

"If you start to go, I'll catch you," I said. "I'm stronger than I look."

"That's not comforting."

"It's not meant to be. Stand."

His left leg trembled.

His hands curled into fists at his sides.

He stood alone on that terrace, with nothing holding him up, for the length of one slow breath.

Then his knee went, and I caught his weight against my shoulder, and we both laughed, short and shocked, because neither of us had expected it to work.

"One breath," I said.

"One breath," he said into my hair.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

He read the screen, and everything in his face went hard again.

"My father," he said. "The medical board has moved the date up. It's sixty days now, not ninety."

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