Chapter 10: Both Wounds

"That's not possible," Philip said.

He said it to the portrait, not to anyone in the room.

"Felicity's report came from a lab," he said. "Mother, you read it."

"I read a page. I never saw the lab."

"It said Ivy was not ours."

"It said so," my mother said. "I wanted it to be true so badly that I never asked who ran it."

My knees felt weak.

I had grown up believing I was a stranger who'd been given a bedroom by mistake.

I had spent four years telling myself I had made peace with that.

"I need air," I said.

Douglas opened the garden doors for me and followed.

The roses had not been cut in years and the path was overgrown.

I stopped at the stone bench under the apple tree and stood with my arms around myself.

"Are you all right?"

"I don't know what I am."

"You're Polly's mother."

"That's the only part I'm sure of."

He stood a pace away with his hands in his coat pockets.

It was the right distance and I hated that he'd learned it.

"I have to ask you something," I said. "And I want a true answer."

"Ask."

"Did you ever once call me back? After you ended it?"

"I told you. I called your phone for a month."

"I changed the number that night. You'd have known that if you'd called the first day."

He looked at the ground.

"I called on the third day."

"Three days. You gave me three days, and then you held an engagement party."

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Gave My Place to Her, So I Vanished With His Child from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.