Wash Her Feet novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Live
The studio was cold, and the couch they put me on was white.
A woman with a clip-on microphone and a very kind voice told me we had four minutes before the red light.
"Ms. Bradstreet, you don't have to say anything you aren't ready to say."
"I'm ready."
Rafe stood behind the camera with Lance, who had not stopped chewing his thumbnail since the car.
The host sat down across from me, a woman in her fifties with smooth blond hair.
The light went red.
"Good morning," she said to the lens. "Yesterday a video of a young woman in a bedsheet was seen by nine million people. Today she's here. Hallie, welcome."
"Thank you."
"Many people are worried about you. Your friend, a pediatric nurse, says you may be under the influence of a stranger. Are you okay?"
"I want to start with something else," I said.
The host blinked.
"Nineteen years ago," I said, "the back stairs of an apartment building collapsed in this city and killed a woman named Joan Kessel. She was thirty-one. She was carrying a laundry basket."
The room got quiet.
"The building was built by my father, Frank Bradstreet. He paid the inspector four thousand dollars in cash. He took eleven thousand off the cost of the stair brackets. When Joan Kessel died, he did not pay her children, and he never said her name aloud."
"Hallie..." the host said.
"I found out on Monday night from his own ledger," I said. "I'm telling you before anyone else does, because it's true, and because I don't want to be told it again on this couch by someone who is enjoying it."
I looked into the camera.
"Her son was fourteen. Her daughter was nine. They're grown now. I intend to give them my father's house and every cent he left, and I'm saying it here so I can't take it back."
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