Husband Faked His Death and Left Me, Now He Regrets It, Sorry, You Can Only Repent at My Grave novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: She's Yours

"Carry who?" my mother said.

Nobody answered her.

Stewart had gone gray to the mouth.

"Beth," he said. "Don't."

"Why not?" Beth said. She stood at the end of the table with her hands at her sides. "You all want the truth. I thought we might as well have the whole thing."

"Sit down," my father said.

"No, Dad. I've sat down for twenty-one years."

It was the first time I had heard her voice go flat.

"I was six when you took me," she said. "I knew every day what I was for. I was the one you were grateful to have. Geneva was the one you were proud of."

"That's not true," my mother said, crying.

"She sang in the choir. She got the scholarship. She got the boy." Beth looked at me, and for once there was no kindness in it. "And then she was gone, and for the first time in my life I was the only daughter you had left."

"You saw me at Riverview," I said.

"Yes." She didn't blink. "Day two. I went to the unit for a shift, and there you were in bed four with a tube in your throat. I stood at the end of the bed for ten minutes."

"And you walked out."

"I thought, if I say nothing, I'm the one who gets to stay." She shrugged, one small movement. "I came back on the ninth day to make sure you wouldn't come home. It was easier than I expected. You believed me right away."

I couldn't speak.

She had said it so lightly that I almost missed what it was.

"Dad could bury you," Beth said. "Stewart could finally cry. And I was there, every night, being what they needed. That's all I wanted, a place that was mine."

"You took my fiancé," I said.

"I took what was left lying around." She turned to Stewart. "Go on. Tell her the rest. You've been dying to."

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