The Son Who Returned to Expose Their Shame novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Wrong Son

"Joelle," my father said from the podium. "Stop talking."

My mother didn't look at him.

She looked at the room.

"I won't stand here and be ashamed in front of people I've fed at my own table," she said. "You all have children. Some of you have more than one. Don't pretend you've never had to choose."

A woman at the board table said, "Choose?"

"Bryce had nobody." She lifted her chin. "So I chose. I'd choose the same tonight."

"He did five years," Gran said from the cart. "Every day of it."

"Because he wouldn't say sorry at his parole hearings!" For the first time, my mother's voice rose. "He could have been out in two. He chose to stay in there to punish me."

The room took that in.

I saw people do the math on their faces.

"So, yes," my mother said, quieter again. "We knew. And we did what a family does. We closed ranks around the weakest one. I'd do it again."

My father, at the podium, closed his eyes.

He didn't say anything.

He didn't say he'd do it again. He'd already said that to me, and he didn't have it in him to say it to the mayor's office.

He just stood there in his bow tie with his hands on the wood.

Somebody touched my elbow.

It was the young man with the earpiece from the door. He held out a handheld microphone like it might bite him.

"Sir," he said. "I think you should have this."

I took it.

I didn't go up on the stage.

I stood where I was, in the middle of the dance floor, in my grandfather's pinned tuxedo.

"My name's Roark Keene," I said. "Most of you know me as the one who did it."

Nobody moved.

"I was asleep on the dock. My father bought the tape. My mother told my sister what to say. And my brother let a girl lie in the road for four minutes and then sat by her bed for five years."

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