The Husband Who Lied to Me novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: What the Bookkeeper Owed
Ruby's POV
Russ came back after dark with road dust on his boots and a face I had not seen on him yet.
I was on the porch with the lights off, holding the lock key in my fist.
He stopped at the foot of the steps.
"Sit down," he said. "I'll tell you all of it, and you won't like any of it."
I sat.
He told me the salon owner's name was not the point, and that Kristen was.
He told me Kristen had vouched for the charming man, month after month.
Then he held out his phone with my own wedding photograph on it, and a woman in a pale green dress with her finger on her face.
"She picked her out of that," he said. "She didn't have to look twice."
I did not scream.
I did not cry, either.
I looked at Kristen's small, smiling face and thought of her at nineteen in our dorm, borrowing my sweaters and eating my crackers and telling me I was the only person who had ever been kind to her.
She had held my hair back.
She had stood in the hospital waiting room with me when my grandfather died.
"Ruby," Russ said.
"She picked me," I said. "She sat with me for ten years."
"I know."
"How long did she know about my grandfather's will?"
"I don't know."
"Why me?"
"I don't know that either."
I stood up and walked to the end of the porch.
The lake was black and flat, with one light on the far shore.
I put both hands on the rail.
I said, "Is the baby even his?"
"Ruby."
"I need to know what's real. Is there any piece of this that's real?"
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