Five Hours a Year novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Five Free Hours
By Thursday morning, the photographers outside our building had a folding stool.
There were eleven of them and two vans with dishes on the roof.
A woman with a microphone called out my first name.
"They'll be at the courthouse, too," Alec said, from the kitchen doorway. He had not slept. "I can go out first and take it."
"No."
"Leah..."
"They want the husband who sent invoices. Give them the wife who didn't pay one." I fastened my mother's pearls at my throat. "Donna, are you ready?"
"I've been ready since the airport," my mother said.
She stood in the hall in her navy suit, with her glasses on their cord.
She held her handbag in front of her with both hands.
Frances looked her over.
"Donna, you can't carry that onto the steps."
"It has my pills in it."
"Then it's a prop, and I approve."
We went down together in the freight elevator, and out into a wall of noise.
"Leah! Leah, is it true he billed you for your father's funeral?"
"Did you really approve the invoices?"
"Mrs. Kittridge, do you have a statement?"
I stopped on the top step of the courthouse, and the cameras swung.
I had stood on the top step of a church not long ago with a phone in my hand and nobody listening.
Now there were forty microphones.
"I do," I said. "Briefly."
They went quiet.
"It's true. My husband gave me five free hours a year. Everything past that went on a monthly invoice at his full rate. I want to say, in fairness, that he's a very busy man."
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