My Best Friend Changed Boyfriends Weekly... Until She Chose My Ten-Year Fiancé novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Rent

On Sunday morning Willem drove me to Evanston with the radio off.

I watched his right hand on the gear shift, the scarred knuckles and the pale line across the back of it.

I thought about that hand and nothing else for nine blocks.

"I want to go in alone," I said, when he stopped in front of the narrow yellow house.

"Your call."

"Don't wait out here looking like a getaway driver."

"I'll look like a man reading a map."

Mallory's mother opened the door in a quilted robe, and she took one look at me and pulled me into her arms.

She smelled like toast and lavender, exactly as she had when I was eighteen.

"Ginny. Honey. Come in. I saw the post, and I've been sick about it since seven."

Her kitchen had a yellow table with a burn mark in the shape of a pear.

I sat down at it and didn't waste her time.

"Mrs. Pendergast, I need you to tell me what Mal's father did."

She went still, with the kettle in her hand.

"Diane Koehler told Mal she'd tell me," I said. "Mal has been scared of it for years. I'd rather hear it from you."

She set the kettle down.

"Your husband kept the books for the Koehler company," I said. "I know that much."

"He did," she said. "When Mallory was nine he took sixty-one thousand dollars out of the company account, a little at a time."

"Why?"

"Our house was going to be sold, and he was too proud to tell me."

She said it all in one flat breath.

"Diane's husband found it. He didn't call the police. He said we'd rent one of his houses, this one, and pay back every dollar in cash on the first of the month."

"And did you?"

She opened her mouth.

The front door opened without a knock, and a woman's heels crossed the hall.

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