Betrayed: She Took My Son novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Lake House

The pin was Philip's mother's lake house on Buckeye Lake.

He had told me about it the first month we dated.

His mother wintered in Florida and left the place shut up from October until May.

We drove there in the dark, in Philip's Audi, with Dot's truck behind us.

Nobody mentioned the barn.

Philip drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road.

Clayton sat in the back beside me, with a careful foot of seat between us.

At six the sky went gray over the water.

Philip stopped at the end of the gravel drive and turned off the engine.

Through the bare trees I could see the roof, the screened porch, and past it a long wooden dock.

Someone was sitting at the end of it.

I knew the back of that head. I had braided that hair when it was white-blond and two years old.

She had a bundle in her lap, and the bundle was blue.

"That's her," Philip whispered.

"Let me go," I said.

"No." Clayton put his hand on my arm. "Listen to me."

"She ran from a house with a baby at two in the morning," he said. "She'll run farther if she sees you."

"He's my son."

"And he's in her lap, forty feet over cold water. If she sees you, she moves. If she sees Philip, she talks."

I hated that he was right.

Philip looked at me in the mirror.

"I'll go," he said. "I'll keep her talking. Stay here. Please, Melanie."

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