My Son Is the Secret That Will Break Them novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Smile in the Corner

I stood up before the hall finished leaning toward her.

"Before I answer, I'd like my son out of the room," I said. "He's four, and he doesn't need to hear this."

The eldest nodded.

My investigator came up the aisle and lifted Arlo out of his chair.

"Are you winning?" Arlo asked me over his shoulder.

"I'm working on it."

"Okay," he said, and put his cheek on the investigator's collar and was carried out into the sun.

The doors closed behind them.

I turned to the bench.

"My name is Thea Harrow," I said. "I'm a registered investigator with Mercer and Veil, which handles inter-pack disputes, and I'm here as the boy's mother and as a woman this pack drove out."

A murmur ran through the rows.

"The petitioner says I stole a Maddox heir," I said. "I was put on a plane by this pack, with a letter in my own handwriting saying I'd chosen to go. I never wrote it."

I laid two sheets on the table in front of the elders.

"This is that letter. This is the one that called the night I spent with the Beta a grief mistake and said he'd frozen my stipend. He never wrote it either."

The eldest picked them up.

"These are on cream paper," he said.

"With a lighthouse pressed blind into the corner. A lab in Boston has matched it to the stamp the relief fund uses, and only to that stamp."

Every head in the hall turned to Cora.

She did not flinch.

She lowered the handkerchief and looked at the elders with wet, steady, wounded eyes.

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