Wedding Eve Goodbye novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Boathouse

The lawn went dead silent.

Every camera stayed on Dominic, and the woman with the microphone had stopped breathing.

My hand was still in his.

I felt it go cold.

"Dominic," I said. "Tell me she's lying."

He did not look at the cameras.

He did not look at Rhonda.

He looked at me, and I saw him decide to say it.

"I was driving," he said.

I let go of his hand.

Cameras fired in a wild burst, and the reporter was shouting my name.

I turned and walked up the steps and through the front door, and Odile was standing in the hall with her cane.

"Child," she said.

I went past her.

I went through the kitchen and out the back door and down the long wet lawn toward the river.

The sky had been low all morning, and by the time I reached the boathouse it broke open.

Rain came down in sheets.

I got the side door open and stood inside among the upturned rowboats and the coils of rope, soaked to the skin.

I heard him a minute later.

His footsteps came down the path at a run, and the door banged against the wall.

He stood in the opening with water running off his face.

"Tell me all of it," I said.

"Elin..."

"You were driving, and my father died in your car, and in three years you never said a word."

"Rhonda phoned him from the dinner," Dominic said. "She told him to come home at once. He asked me to drive him, because he'd had two glasses of wine."

"Where was this?"

"On Route 9. It was raining. A truck ran the red light and hit the passenger side."

His voice did not shake.

His hands did, and he pressed them against his thighs.

"I walked out with a cut over my eye," he said. "He lived two hours. I was with him."

"What did he say?"

"He made me promise to look after you. He said not to let you blame yourself. Or me, I think. He wasn't clear by then."

"And there was something else," I said.

His eyes closed.

"There was something else," he said. "It isn't mine to say."

"Is that today's answer?"

"Yes."

I crossed the boathouse floor and hit him in the chest with both fists.

He did not move.

I hit him again, and he stood and took it.

"You let me love you," I said. "You let me stand outside your door for three years and you said get lost, and the whole time you were holding my father's blood on your hands."

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