This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Through the Glass

Mabel couldn't move.

Her father was looking straight at her.

A stretch of sidewalk and four lanes of traffic were all that stood between them.

In her first life, she had prayed for this every night for years.

That he'd look at her. Just once.

Trenton Ainsworth's cold blue eyes moved across the car window.

They didn't stop.

He was looking past her, at his own reflection in the glass of the bank behind them.

He straightened his tie.

Then he turned and went into the hotel without looking back.

Mabel stayed exactly where she was, with her hand on the window.

"Bug," said Hank quietly from the front seat. "You can breathe now."

She breathed.

It came out shaky.

"Was that him?"

"Yes."

Hank didn't say anything else.

He just watched her in the rearview mirror, steady and patient.

Mabel took her hand off the glass.

There was a small, sweaty print where it had been.

She looked at it.

She had waited eight years of her first life for that man to see her.

She had died waiting.

And he'd just looked right at her and fixed his tie.

Something in her chest that had been clenched for a very long time let go.

She didn't need him to see her.

She'd been seen. Every day, for two months, by a tired man who noticed when her socks were wet.

"Dad," she said. "When Mom comes out, can we get ice cream?"

Hank looked at her in the mirror for another second.

Then the corner of his mouth moved.

It was almost a smile.

"It's forty degrees out."

"I know."

"Okay."

Fern came out twenty minutes later and slid into the front seat.

She buckled her seatbelt and leaned back.

"Well?" said Hank.

"She'll behave," said Fern. "For now."

"For now?"

"She's a smart woman. She'll do the math. She needs our girl lost until she's nine, same as we do." Fern turned around in her seat. "Hi, sweetheart. Did you see anything interesting?"

"I saw a man fix his tie," Mabel said.

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