He Swapped Himself Out at the Altar, So I Married the Honest Stranger novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Gene

Hoyt sat down.

I heard it, the creak of a banquet chair taking his weight after his father's curt order.

Gene came up the stage steps slowly.

I knew his tread by the camel coat that whispered at his knees.

He stopped beside me and did not look at me.

"Madam Chairwoman," he said into the microphone. "I would like to answer your question."

"Please," she said.

"Yes. My son has been married to Cecelia Geller for two years."

A sound went through the room like wind through dry grass.

"And I have known it for two years," Gene said. "Since the week it happened."

I felt Cal shift beside me.

"Her father tends a bar on the east end," Gene said. "I bought the mortgage on it that Friday, so that nobody on either side would talk."

"I told my son to get his house in order. I did not tell him to stop."

"I wanted a steady wife on the record and I did not care whose life I borrowed to get one."

Nobody breathed.

I had never heard Gene say a plain thing in his life.

"June Almgren's father tuned the piano in my mother's house for thirty years," he said. "He charged me half of what he charged anyone, and never said why."

"I held a note on his building. I wrote a clause in it that I thought was kind. I never wrote who the husband was, because I assumed I would be the one to pick him."

His voice scraped.

"I did not pick the man who stood up for her."

The chairwoman said, "Mr. Sandberg, are you telling this board that you concealed a material fact about an officer of this company?"

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