She Jumped Into His Pool and Blamed Me, So I Left Him novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Returned

Valerie's POV

I didn't open the locket until Sunday morning, at the boathouse table, with coffee going cold beside it.

The gold clicked in my thumbnail.

Inside, where my grandmother's face should have been, there was a tiny photograph of two children on a dock.

A fair boy of nine, grinning, and a small girl with her hair in two braids, laughing up at him.

Bennett had swapped the picture.

I sat looking at it for a long time.

"He took her out," I said aloud, to nobody. "He put himself in."

Someone knocked, softly, at the screen door.

Lila stood on the porch in jeans and a gray T-shirt, with no makeup and her hair pulled back.

She looked tired and much younger than twenty-seven.

She was holding a very small envelope in both hands.

"Can I come in?"

I thought about it.

"You can stand there," I said. "I haven't decided about inside."

"That's fair."

She didn't come in.

She held out the envelope, and I took it, and I tipped it into my palm.

It was a creased square of photo paper, soft at the edges from handling.

My grandmother looked up at me, thin and fierce, in her good church hat, with her chin lifted exactly the way mine lifts.

My eyes stung.

"He took it out the second week of July," Lila said. "He told me to throw it away. I couldn't, so I kept it in my wallet, behind my mother's picture."

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