He Cheated on Our Wedding Night, I Canceled His Fortune novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Sisters

We sat at the kitchen table, the three of us, with the door shut and the coffee going cold.

Brooke sat at one end with her hands in her lap.

My father sat at the other with his bad knee out straight.

I sat in the middle and kept my hands flat on the wood, so they would stay still.

"Start at the beginning," I said.

"I was thirty," my father said. "Before I ever met your mother."

He did not look up.

"There was a girl who cooked at the Kell house. She was twenty-two. We were together one summer."

"My mother," Brooke said.

"Yes."

"And then?"

"Then she told me she was expecting, and I told her I wasn't ready." He rubbed his face. "I was a coward, Annie. I said I'd help her. I never said I'd marry her."

"You were engaged to Mom?"

"Not yet. I met Anne that winter."

The kitchen clock ticked.

"I didn't tell your mother," he said. "I didn't tell anyone. I paid the checks every month. I never missed one."

"Every month," Brooke said. "For thirty-one years."

"I thought it was enough."

"It paid for my school shoes," Brooke said. "It didn't buy me a father."

I stared at the grain of the table.

My mother had died when I was nineteen, and for nine years I had kept house for a man I thought I knew.

"Mom never knew?"

"No."

"Does anyone else?"

My father opened his mouth, and then shut it.

"Constance," he said.

Brooke gave a short ugly laugh.

"Of course Constance."

"She found the envelopes in her own kitchen drawer ten years ago," my father said. "She's known since then. She never said a word. Until last spring."

"What happened last spring?"

"The drought note." He swallowed. "I needed nine hundred thousand dollars to hold the herd. She lent it. And then she came out here, to this kitchen, and sat where you're sitting."

I did not say anything.

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