Reborn: I Let My Mother Suffer the Price of Her Favoritism novel · Chapter 27 of 32

Chapter 27: The Best Pot Roast

Everett's POV

Callie squeezed my hand once and let go.

The bailiff stood at the end of the hall, and he was watching us.

I walked to the water fountain.

Maureen Haldane looked up at me with the face I had once thought was the kindest in Connecticut.

"You've lost weight," she said. "She doesn't feed you."

"What do you want?"

"To say something as a mother-in-law." She kept her voice low and warm. "Callie is not well, Everett. She never has been. She makes up stories, and she makes people choose, and this has gone on long enough."

"Is that what you tell the jury?"

"I'm telling you." She put her hand on my sleeve. "If she steps aside tomorrow, I will sign the house over to the two of you. The deed, the land, everything. Dale will say whatever you need. You'll have Sundays again, with pot roast. You always said it was the best you'd had."

I looked at her hand.

I had said that.

I had said it three times at her table, with my napkin in my lap.

Callie had sat beside me each time, with her makeup laid on thick under one eye.

"I did say that," I told her. "I'm going to hear myself say it for the rest of my life."

"There. You see."

"Mrs. Haldane, take your hand off my arm."

She didn't, so I lifted it off myself, carefully, by the wrist, and set it against her handbag.

"I fix things," I said. "It's all I know how to do. I can't fix you, and I'm not going to try to fix her. She isn't broken. You are the thing in that house that broke."

The smile stayed on her face.

Her eyes did not.

"Bailiff," I said, not loudly, and the man at the end of the hall started toward us.

She walked away.

When I turned, there was an older man waiting beside the stairwell door, in a camel coat, with a lawyer I didn't know at his shoulder.

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