Chapter 10: The Keys

Kendrick did not move for a moment.

Then he straightened, buttoned his collar with one hand, and unhooked the ring of brass keys from his belt.

He didn't put them in my mother's palm.

He set them on the table beside the broken plate, and they rang once against the wood.

"Twelve years, Mrs. Aldercott," he said. "Every one of those keys is where it should be."

"You'll be off the estate by noon tomorrow."

"Yes, madam."

"And you," she said to me, and her voice shook very slightly, "may have him."

She turned and walked up the lawn in the dark, straight-backed, and didn't once look behind her.

The door swung shut on the wind.

The stove ticked.

I stood up, and my knees were not entirely reliable.

"You said not while you carry its keys," I said.

Kendrick looked at the table.

"I did."

"Where are they?"

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he crossed the floor, and his hands were in my hair and his mouth was on mine before I could finish the thought.

There was nothing polite in it this time.

He kissed me like a man who had run out of reasons, and I kissed him back with twelve years of everything I had never said.

I got his shirt open, and he pulled the grey dress over my head and dropped it somewhere behind us.

The cold air hit my skin, and then his hands did, and I stopped feeling the cold.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Slapping Her Out of Her Delusion from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.