The Wedding She Survived novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: What She Owes
I peeled Poppy off my mother's legs and picked her up.
My mother kissed her hair and did not look at me.
"Be good for your mama," she whispered.
Then she went out into the dark with her suitcase, and a taxi was waiting at the curb with its engine running.
She had called it before she came downstairs.
Poppy cried herself to sleep on my shoulder.
I did not sleep at all.
On Saturday morning, I took the kids to the harbor park as I had promised, and Killian was already there on our bench.
He stood when he saw us.
He looked as if he hadn't slept either.
"Go play," I said to the kids, and they ran for the swings.
Poppy didn't run.
She walked, with her head down, and sat on the swing without pumping her legs.
I watched her for a moment, and then I turned around.
"Sit down," I said.
He sat.
"I want to ask you something, and I want an answer with no excuse in it."
"All right."
"You flew to Hamburg. You took your father's shipyard. For five years, you were four thousand miles from a woman you say you loved."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you come home?"
"I told you. I believed you'd signed."
"You believed a lawyer in a church hallway."
"Yes."
"You believed a piece of paper over a woman you were marrying in ten minutes!"
My voice carried across the grass.
A man with a dog turned his head and kept walking.
"You never called me," I said. "You never asked a single person. Not my friends. Not my father's old pastor. Nobody. You took it from a stranger in a hallway, and you decided I was someone who could be bought."
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