My Cowboy Husband Neglected Me Ignored Our Baby for Another Woman's novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: There Won't Be a Wednesday

We drove to the Haskell place in two trucks with the headlights off the last half mile.

Jesse had Dean beside him.

The widow had stayed behind with Daisy, and she knew exactly where we had gone.

Lottie stood on her porch in the yellow bulb light with her phone held up in front of her face.

The live counter said more than four hundred people were watching.

Birdie was not in sight.

"And here she comes," Lottie said brightly, to the lens. "The woman who's been hiding him."

I walked up the yard with my hands open.

Dean got out of the other truck behind me.

"Stay back," I said.

"No."

"Dean."

"I've stayed back for five years," he said quietly. "I'm done."

He came up beside me into the yellow light.

Lottie turned the phone on him.

"There he is. Everyone, this is Dean Odom, who did two years in prison for putting a man in a wheelchair, and who now wants to take my daughter."

He took off his hat.

"Yes," Dean said. "That's me."

The little numbers on the screen went up.

"I did two years in North Dakota for drunk driving. I was twenty-three. I hurt a man for life, and I think about him every day. I've been sober for two years and four months."

His voice shook, but it carried.

"I'm Birdie's father. I'm the one who left. And I'm the one who's coming back."

Lottie's smile slipped.

She hadn't expected him to say it himself.

"You abandoned her."

"I did. Then I sent you nine hundred dollars a month for two years, because you said you'd tell my sister where I was if I didn't."

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