Contract Over: You're Free to Go novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: What She Signed

I drove straight to the shop with Archie buckled into the back seat.

He asked me twice why I was driving so fast.

"I'm not, bud."

"You are. The speedometer's doing the thing."

I eased off.

Timothy and his wife took him upstairs for grilled cheese.

I stood in the alley behind the building in my good shirt and could not make my thoughts line up.

A white car turned into the alley and stopped.

Margot got out.

She stood in front of her car with her hands empty and her coat open.

"I won't ask you to listen," she said. "I'll just say it. Then you can tell me to go."

"Say it."

I got into the truck and left the passenger door open.

She sat down.

She told it looking out through the windshield at the brick wall, and I did not interrupt.

She said her half-sister had left home at nineteen.

There had been a fight with their father about a boy at a music school.

She said they wrote each other for years, in secret, from a post office box.

She said that four years ago the letters stopped.

A week later a county clerk called the house to say a woman had died in a crash on an Ohio highway.

"I went to the morgue myself," Margot said. "I was twenty-six. I stood there and I saw her ribs, and her bird, and I knew."

"And you saw the baby on the form."

"The only name next to hers was yours. There was a hospital bill with your signature. She had written on the back of a photograph in her purse: If anything happens, find Declan."

Her voice stopped.

I looked at my hands on the wheel.

"She never told me her name was Southwell," I said.

"She hated it."

"She told me she was alone."

"She was afraid." Margot turned her face. "My father had a man with a camera outside her school once, the week she turned eighteen. He wanted her at the company. When she said no, he stopped paying for everything and had her followed. She ran. I was fifteen. She told me she'd never come back unless it was safe."

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