The Discarded Heiress Returns novel · Chapter 5 of 32
Chapter 5: Every Room Booked
"Twelve," I said.
The word came out flat.
Dale came around the hood of the truck and stood beside me.
He didn't touch me. He just stood close enough that I could feel him there.
"When you broke your wrist," Edmund said. "The spring you fell off the pony at riding camp."
"I remember."
"The emergency room typed your blood for the surgery. O-negative." He turned the glasses over in his hands. "Your mother and I are both AB. A child of ours can't be O."
"She knew that night?"
"She knew that night. She told the doctor it was a lab error and asked for the chart."
The streetlight above us buzzed and stayed dark.
"Then she called the hospital's old night nurse," Edmund said. "She asked which other girls were born during the storm."
"And hired somebody."
He nodded.
"An investigator. For five years. I found the bills on Monday, after she showed me the lab report."
I thought of a yellow raincoat at a bus stop.
Dale made a sound low in his chest.
"Five years," Dale said. "You people watched my girl for five years and never knocked on my door."
"I didn't know until Monday," Edmund said.
"And on Saturday you looked at your shoes," I said.
He flinched.
He reached into his jacket and took out a checkbook.
"Let me do one thing right," he said. "The motel loan. Whatever it takes. Today."
Dale looked at the checkbook.
I knew what a hundred and eighty thousand dollars meant to a man sleeping at his kitchen table.
I also knew what it meant to my mother.
Every check from that family came with a pen and a line to sign.
"No," I said.
"Tallulah."
"You don't get to pay for Saturday. And I'm not asking you for anything."
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