The Love We Missed novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Offer

I went at ten.

I didn't change out of the clothes I'd driven to Shadyside in.

His mother opened the door herself in a cream twinset and her pearls, with her hair done.

She looked at my coat and my pajama pants and didn't comment.

That was how I knew she wanted something.

"The kitchen," she said.

Her kitchen was bigger than my whole upstairs unit.

There was a card table already set up in the sunroom off it, with four decks and a silver bowl of mints.

Wednesday was bridge.

She hadn't canceled bridge for this.

"Coffee?"

"No."

She poured herself a cup anyway and sat down at the marble island.

She folded her hands on a white envelope.

"I'll be brief," she said. "You've had a shock. You're not thinking clearly, and you're about to do something that hurts my granddaughter."

"Which thing is that?"

"Ciaran." She said his name like a bad smell. "He's unstable. He always has been. He disappeared for seven years."

"He disappeared because you told him to keep his mouth shut."

Her eyes didn't even flicker.

She slid the envelope across the marble.

"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars," she said. "A cashier's check. That's your grandmother's ninety back, and then some. Consider it my apology for the way things worked out."

I didn't touch it.

"What's the catch?"

"Not a catch. Terms." She ticked them off on her fingers, the way I'd done to Patrick on the lawn. "You take Nellie and leave Pittsburgh. Columbus. Philadelphia. Wherever you like. You don't see Ciaran again. And Patrick has her every summer, June through August, at this house."

"With Bria braiding her hair."

"With her family."

The doorbell rang.

She glanced at the clock.

"That'll be the girls. Take a moment."

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