My First Love Returned, His Stand-In Begged Me to Stay novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Monty's Mother

Monty's POV

"Go home," I told the ballroom. "Whatever you heard tonight, you heard from me."

Nobody left right away.

Then the treasurer stood, and buttoned his jacket, and walked out without looking at my mother, and the rest began to follow him.

I stepped down from the stage and went through the door behind the podium.

The green room had a sofa, a mirror and a tray of untouched sandwiches.

My mother sat on the sofa with her purse in her lap.

She had taken off her earrings and set them on the cushion beside her.

"Close the door," she said.

I closed it.

"You humiliated yourself in front of three hundred people," she said. "You humiliated me."

"You wrote that text."

"I protected you."

"From what?"

"From a girl with no family and no money, who would have kept you in Chicago eating out of takeout boxes while your father lay in a bed in Zurich." She said it evenly. "You were twenty-four. You couldn't be trusted with your own life."

"I could have been trusted with that one decision."

"You drank for a year."

"I drank because you took the only thing I had."

She looked at me for a long moment.

"You had a name, Montgomery," she said. "I gave you that. You can't read a contract, you can't read a speech, you can't read the letters your own cousin sent back. Every door you've walked through, I held open."

It was the oldest cut she had.

When I was nine she'd paid a tutor to teach me in the pool house so no one at school would know.

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