This Time, I Accept Your Brother's Claim novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: Brother-in-Law

"Your brother," I said.

It came out before I could stop it.

Auden's face went blank.

"Piers?"

"Yes."

"When? Last night? Did he come to the villa?"

Something gold flickered in his green eyes.

His wolf, coming up to look.

"Not last night," I said. "And not in this life."

He frowned.

"I don't know what that means."

I wiped my face with the heel of my hand.

I could have lied to him. I'd lied to everyone since I woke up on that sofa.

But it was him.

It was him, and he was crouched in the gravel with his hands on his knees, waiting.

"Sit down," I said. "You won't believe me, and I need you to sit down while you don't."

He sat on the wall beside me.

I told him.

It took until the tea went cold.

He didn't interrupt once.

I didn't tell him about the man at the bars.

Not yet.

When I finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Okay, I think you had a really bad dream. Or a Moon vision. My grandmother had those."

He said it gently.

"It wasn't a dream."

"Elspeth, you're twenty-two. You've never been married."

"I was married for fifty years. I died at seventy-two."

He rubbed his face.

"Look. I believe you believe it."

"You write to your mother."

His hands stopped.

"Every year on her birthday," I said. "You sit up the night before and write her a letter."

"Pages. You tell her about your patients and your brothers and the bike."

He'd gone white under his tan.

"Then you walk down to the old dock at dawn and burn it at the edge of the water."

"You push the ash into the lake with your hand."

"Stop."

"You started the year she died. You were seven."

"Nobody knows that."

"You've never told anyone."

"Then how..."

His voice cracked on it.

"You told me," I said. "When you were fifty-one. The night after my second draught."

He stared at me.

"You sat on the floor outside my door all night, because you weren't allowed in. You talked through the wood so I wouldn't be alone."

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