A Marriage Left Behind novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Her Own Name

We signed on the third Friday of January, in a windowless room on the second floor of the county building.

There was a long table, a water pitcher nobody touched, and my lawyer on one side with a stack of paper.

Brady sat on the other side, in a suit I had bought him for a cousin's wedding.

His father sat beside him, holding a banker's box in his lap.

Brady had lost weight in a month, and he did not look at me until the lawyer said we could begin.

"No fight," Brady said before she could. "Whatever it says, I sign."

"There's a lot of it," my lawyer said.

"Then I'll read it first."

He read every page.

It took him forty minutes, and nobody hurried him.

At the end he took the pen, and I watched him sign without pausing on any line.

His hand was steady, and that was somehow the worst part.

Then Brady's father put the box on the table, opened a flap, and slid a long envelope across to me.

"The parish closed on the lodge Wednesday," he said. "Every guest was repaid first. This is yours."

It was a cashier's check, and I read the number twice.

It was seventy-seven thousand dollars, to the cent.

"Plus," Brady said.

He took a second paper out of his jacket and put it next to the first.

It was the two-thousand-dollar check I had refused on the doorstep in December, made out to me again, with today's date.

"That's the plus," he said. "The first one I tried to hand you so you'd forgive me. This one I'm giving you because it's yours."

I looked at him for a long time.

Then I took both checks and put them in my bag.

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