He Ditched Our Wedding, I Married His Wealthy Uncle novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Live From the Barn

I watched the green bar climb past three point two million.

Every dollar of it was paying for Mabel's worst night.

Ramsey read it over my shoulder and swore, very quietly, for a long time.

"I can have a lawyer on Kyla by nine," he said.

"No."

"Jo."

"A lawyer takes a month. She took forty minutes." I stood up. "I'll take ten."

I went down the ladder.

Mabel was standing in her stall, swaying a little, eating hay with the slow care of an old lady at a buffet.

I picked a straw out of her ear.

Then I called the vet back.

"I need everything you wrote down last night," I said. "And her chart. Six years of it."

"It's six in the morning, Jody."

"I know. They're telling people we let her rot."

There was a pause.

"I'll send it all," she said. "Give me ten minutes."

At seven I propped my phone on a bucket in front of Mabel's stall, the way I used to for Ramsey's calls from London.

I didn't brush my hair.

I didn't wash the straw off my face.

I hit LIVE.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Jody Laird. I'm the head keeper at Pine Hollow Elephant Refuge in the Catskills."

A dozen people were watching.

"This is Mabel. She's fifty-eight. If you saw a video this morning of an elephant flat in the straw with a tractor pulling on her, that was her."

Mabel reached past me and took a carrot out of my pocket.

Forty people.

"Old elephants with arthritis lie down to sleep. Sometimes they can't get up. Last night she couldn't. Those straps are how you get her up. That tractor is how you get her up. Nobody was hurting her."

I held up the vet's notes to the camera.

"Here's her chart. Here's last night, hour by hour. She stood at ten past five."

← Chapter 6 · All chapters · Chapter 8 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend