The Wedding She Survived novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Killian's Door

I woke the kids at five o'clock and told them we were having a sleepover.

"With Killian?" Poppy said.

"With Killian."

"Is Grandma coming?"

"Not tonight."

Poppy looked at my face for a second, and she did not ask again.

I packed one bag for all three of them and carried the stub and the fourteen letters in my other hand.

My mother sat in the front room with the lamp off, and she watched us go down the stairs and out the door.

I didn't say goodbye.

She didn't ask me to.

Killian opened his door before I reached it, and he looked at what I was holding.

His face went white.

"You found it," he said.

"Don't talk. Not yet."

He stepped back and let us in.

I put the kids on his couch with a juice box each and a movie on his laptop.

Then I took him into the kitchen and put the stub on the counter, with the letters beside it.

He picked up the top envelope and turned it over.

It was his own handwriting, with his own Hamburg return address, and the flap was still glued shut.

"Fourteen," he said.

"She kept every one."

"I wrote them for a year."

"I know."

"I kept writing even after nobody answered."

"I know, Killian."

He put the envelope down very gently, with both hands.

"Say something," he said. "Hit me. I would like you to hit me."

"I don't want to hit you."

"What do you want?"

"I want to know what's in your father's will."

He frowned. "Why?"

"Because my mother stood in my kitchen, with that stub in her chest for five years, and told me to ask you."

"I haven't seen it. The lawyer who ran my father's office says the reading isn't until the end of the month."

"The same lawyer who stood in the church vestibule?"

"The same."

"Then she wasn't lying about that part," I said. "Something's coming."

"Then we meet it together."

I looked at him, and I was too tired to be careful.

"I'm so angry at her I can't see straight," I said. "And I still want to go home and fix her tea."

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