They Chose the Wrong Daughter novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: We Gave You Away

I did not sit down.

I kept my back against the desk and my phone in my pocket with the recorder running, and I looked at the two people who had made me.

"Say it," I said.

My father rubbed his face with both hands.

"You've seen the paper," he said. "You know what it says."

"I want to hear it from you."

"We gave you away."

The words dropped into the room, and no one moved.

"Nineteen years ago I owed a man four hundred thousand dollars I did not have," he said. "A shipment sank. The Askews were pressing us on the docks. Fergus Rainey held my note, and he was the only man in the city who would wait."

"And what did he want?"

"Nothing," my father said. "That's the truth. He wanted no cash and no favors. He said he'd forgive the whole debt for a child."

"For me."

"For a child," my mother said.

Her voice was thin.

"He had lost a wife and a baby," she said. "He meant it kindly, in his way. He wanted someone to raise."

"And you handed me over."

"We handed over the one we could hide," my father said.

I stared at him.

"Say that again."

"The Askews demanded our daughter in the peace deal," he said, and the words came faster. "Blood, in writing. We had two children in this house. You, and Clementine."

"Clem was four," my mother said. "She'd lost her own mother in a fire. She cried every night, and she called me Mama from the first week."

"You loved her," I said.

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