His Secret Wife Walked Away Pregnant novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Gentle Is Fine

Veronica sat at the end of the long dining table with her white coat still on and her hands around a cup of tea she wasn't drinking.

Beatrice sat at the head with her cane across her knees.

Teagan stood behind my chair, and Bennett leaned in the doorway.

Nobody had offered Veronica a biscuit.

"Show them," I said.

She put her phone down in the middle of the table and pushed it toward Bennett.

The message at the top was from Gavin, sent at eleven the night of the gala.

"Post it tonight. Say eight weeks. Say it before she gets ahead of this."

Under it was a second text from the next morning.

"I'll send you a clinic printout. Wear the white coat. Cry on camera."

"He gave me the ultrasound," Veronica said. "I didn't know it was from a sample sheet. I thought it was real until your friend read it out in front of the street."

"You were never pregnant," said Teagan.

"No." Her chin shook. "I told him I was. In October, when he started to go cold. I said I was late."

"And then you let him believe it for two months," Beatrice said dryly.

Veronica flinched.

"There's more," she said. "The photographer in the garden. His name is in my phone. Gavin paid him on a credit card in my father's company name."

Bennett's head came up.

"Your father's card."

"He didn't ask. He never asks."

Bennett took the phone and read for a long moment.

"This is your father's company card," he said. "He will want to know that."

"I'm going to tell him myself," said Veronica. "When I get home."

She turned to me.

I had been waiting for her to say something false, and she didn't.

"You stood on that stage with a hospital bracelet on," she said. "And I laughed at you."

"You did."

"I'm sorry."

"I know," I said. "I'm not going to say it's all right."

"I wouldn't."

She stood up and drew the ring off her right hand, where she had worn it every day, and put it on the table beside the cup.

"It was bought with the renovation money, and I'm done wearing it. Do what you want with it."

"I'll give it to the lawyer," said Bennett.

"Do," said Beatrice. "And, Miss Arbuthnot."

Veronica stopped.

"You will eat something before you go. I am eighty, and I am not interested in your pride."

For a moment Veronica's face did a complicated thing.

Then she sat down again and took a biscuit, and Teagan, to my enormous surprise, poured her more tea.

That night I could not stop looking at my own hands.

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