I Didn't Marry Him, I Married The One He Hated novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Her Version

Shelby picked a corner table at a coffee shop in Canal Park where nobody knew either of us.

She had ordered for me already.

A black coffee and a slice of lemon cake, the one I always got.

"I didn't poison it," she said, with a small wet laugh. "Sorry. Bad joke."

"Why am I here?"

"Because I owe you." She tucked her hair behind her ear, and the scar showed, white against her skin. "I owe you a lot. I'm not going to ask you to forgive me for the certificate. I did it. I was jealous, and I did it, and I hate that I did."

I had not expected her to say it.

I put my fork down.

"Why?"

"Because he's the only person who stayed." Her eyes filled. "When my face was in pieces, Linnea, everybody else in my life found a reason to be somewhere else. My own mother couldn't look at me. Trevor drove me to every surgery."

I said nothing.

"I know how it sounds. I know I was the other woman in your house for four years and I didn't even get the benefits." She laughed again, shakily. "I never touched him. I swear that. I just couldn't stand to see him leave me for somebody who'd have a life with him."

"That's what you wanted to tell me?"

"No." She pushed her phone across the table. "This is."

It was a photograph of a dented gray truck, wrapped around a steel guardrail at night, with a police car's lights blurring the edge of the picture.

The windshield was a spiderweb.

There was blood on the glass.

"Eight years ago next month," Shelby said. "I was twenty-one. Magnus called Trevor from a bar at eleven and said he'd had too many and needed a ride. Trevor went and got him. I came along because I was between apartments and Trevor let me stay on his couch."

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