He Let Our Baby Die Over a Hospital Bill novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Everything He Kept

I held the envelope against my chest with both arms.

"Not here," I said.

"Okay."

"Drive me to her," I said.

He didn't ask who.

The cemetery on the west side was green and empty on a Sunday afternoon in late August.

Her stone was small and flat, set into the grass. Gina's office had chipped in for it in July.

It had her name on it, and one date, because she only had one.

I sat down in the grass beside it, and Abe sat a few feet off.

I opened the envelope.

The first page was a sheet of lined paper torn out of a notebook, in his square capitals.

Times down the left margin, numbers down the right, the same ones he'd said under oath.

Every line was in the flat shorthand of a man writing fast so he wouldn't feel it.

At the bottom, smaller, he'd written: Mother did not push once. Mother did everything right.

I read that line four times.

"You wrote that," I said. "That night."

"At the end of my shift. I was sitting in my truck."

"Why?"

He looked at the cottonwood.

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