Unforgiven: The Billionaire's Amnesiac Ex-Wife novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Nineteen Minutes

Stefan's POV

I watched my mother do it from the lobby of Channel Six, on a security monitor, with the sound off.

I saw Lydia walk into the light, and I saw my mother pull off her gloves.

I read her lips as she said it.

Ask my son.

By the time the elevator opened I was standing in front of it.

Lydia came out between Jessamine and a man in a tan raincoat, with her phone in her fist and her face white.

She saw me, and she stopped.

I did not let her ask.

"Yes," I said.

The lobby went quiet around us.

A guard looked at the floor, and Jessamine put a hand on Lydia's back.

"She was alive," I said. "When we drove away, your mother was still alive."

Lydia didn't move.

"I looked back through the rear window. There was a shape in the road, and it moved. I told my mother, and she said it was the wind in a coat."

I made myself keep my eyes on her face.

"I begged her to turn around. She took my phone out of my hand and threw it behind the seat. Two miles on she pulled into a lit gas station to wipe her hands, and I went inside."

"You went inside," Lydia said.

Her voice was perfectly steady, and I would rather have heard a scream.

"I told the clerk to call 911 and gave him the mile marker. I didn't give my name. I said a woman was hurt on Route 9, and I went back out and got in the car."

"Why?"

"Because my mother was in the driver's seat with the engine running. And because I was twenty-three and a coward." My throat closed, and I forced it open. "The ambulance reached her nineteen minutes later. I read the report, years afterward, in my father's study. She was gone when they got there."

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