My Loving Family Paid to Destroy Me novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Church Lot

My mother called on Sunday morning from the church office phone.

I did not know the number, and I almost let it ring out.

"Nolan," she whispered. "St. Brendan's. The lot behind the hall, after the nine o'clock Mass."

Then the line clicked dead.

Laurel watched me put the phone down.

"It could be a trap," she said.

"It could."

"Your father would use her."

"He might not know she's calling."

"And if he does?"

"Then I'll be in a church parking lot with the detective's unmarked car two rows over," I said. "Which is where I'd want to be."

She got up off the mattress and took my face in both hands.

It was the first time she had touched me without a reason.

"Come back," she said.

"I will."

The lot behind St. Brendan's was a square of cracked asphalt with a dumpster and a statue of a saint with no nose.

I parked my mother's sedan beside a gray minivan.

She was already there.

She sat on the low wall by the dumpster in her church coat and her good scarf, with her purse on her knees, looking smaller than I had ever seen her.

She had not slept.

I could tell from across the lot.

When I got out, she stood up so fast her purse slid off her lap.

"Mom."

I caught her before she could bend for it.

She held my wrists and looked up at me with her red-rimmed eyes.

"Did you eat?" she said.

"Mom."

"I'm sorry. It's what I say." She laughed, and it broke in the middle. "Oh, Nolan. I have so little time."

"Does he know you're here?"

"He thinks I'm lighting a candle for you." She pulled her scarf tighter. "He has sent Trenton to drive me to every Mass this week. Trenton's waiting in the narthex. He thinks I'm in the ladies' room."

"Then say it fast."

"I knew."

She said it plainly, with her chin up.

"Not about the alley. I swear that to you on your grandmother's grave. But in your second year gone, I found something in your father's coat pocket."

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