After We Got Engaged, the Six of Us Planned One Last Trip Together Before the Wedding or 24-Hour Couple Swap novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Mother

My mother lives in the same yellow house in Duluth where she raised me.

I let myself in with my key, still in the fitting-room silk under my coat.

She was at the kitchen table with her reading glasses on and her phone held out at arm's length.

She had made a pot of tea and not poured it.

"Sit," she said.

I sat.

"That is your back," she said, and turned the screen toward me.

It was the silent video from the dock. The yellow glow, the glass, the hand in a man's hair.

"It is."

"I know your back. I gave it to you." She put the phone face down. "It came with a message that said, I'm so sorry, I think you should know. From Vera. Who has eaten at this table every Christmas for eleven years."

"Mom."

"Start at the beginning, Signe. I'll interrupt when I need to."

So I told her, and the tea went cold between us.

She interrupted twice. Once to say "Fourteen months?" in a voice I'd heard her use on a contractor, and once to say "Pregnant," very quietly.

When I finished, she took off her glasses and folded them.

"You said yes to her," my mother said. "At the kitchen table."

"I needed her to think she had me."

"Good."

"Good?"

"Your father wouldn't have thought of it. He'd have thrown her into the lake." She poured the tea at last. "Eat a cracker."

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