He Picked the Wrong Wife to Sacrifice for His Sister novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Room 412

Lena tells Quinn Redmond the truth and plays the voicemail. He remembers the driver stopping, standing in the gravel and leaving. The Carraways' lawyer walks in with a check, and Damon behind him.

I took a rideshare to St. Joseph's with my bag on my lap and my grandmother's quilt on top of it.

The woman at the fourth-floor desk looked at my belly, then at her screen.

"Room 412 isn't taking visitors. Only police and his sister, and his sister's in Ohio."

"Tell him the car that hit him belongs to me," I said.

She stared at me. Then she picked up the phone.

A minute later she hung up and pointed down the hall without a word.

Room 412 was at the end of the hall, by a window.

The man in the bed had his left leg up in a frame and a brace around his hips.

His jaw was yellow with old bruises.

A scar ran through his left eyebrow, and his grey eyes were on me before I reached the door.

"You're a Carraway," he said.

I stopped.

"How do you know that name?"

"The police told me whose plates they were. I asked for the registered owner."

He moved his head a little on the pillow.

"The owner's name is Lena Carraway."

"DeSaussure. I kept my own name at work."

"Is that supposed to mean something?"

"The car is mine. I wasn't driving it."

Nothing in his face changed. He looked at the quilt in my arms and the bag on my shoulder.

"You look like you've been put out of somewhere."

"This morning."

"Sit down before you fall down," he said. "I can't get up to catch you."

I sat in the vinyl chair by the bed and told him everything I had.

He didn't interrupt once, not even when I got to the voicemail.

I said the name Laney Carraway out loud, and he repeated it quietly.

"My husband's sister," I said. "She was drunk. She borrowed my car at eight-twelve and brought it back at nine-forty."

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because they're coming here with a check at four. I would rather you heard it from me first."

"That's not an answer."

"They picked me to take the blame," I said.

"I'm twenty-eight weeks pregnant and they wanted me to go to prison for her."

"And then they wanted my daughter."

He didn't say anything for a while.

"Play it," he said.

I held the phone up between us and played Laney's voicemail.

He listened with his eyes closed. When it ended, he didn't open them.

"I was walking home from a night shift on the road past the cemetery," he said.

"There's no sidewalk. It was dark."

"I heard her coming the whole way, because she was on the wrong side of the line."

"She says she didn't see you."

"She saw me."

His eyes opened.

"I went over the hood and into the ditch, and I couldn't move my legs."

"I heard the car stop about forty feet down."

I felt sick.

"A door opened," he said. "Somebody got out and stood there. I could hear heels on the gravel. I called out."

"Quinn," I said.

"You know my name already."

He didn't ask how.

"She stood there long enough that I stopped calling. Then the door shut, and the car drove away."

"She told me she was too scared to stop."

"She stopped. She looked at me. She left."

I pressed a hand against my mouth.

"A trucker found me twenty minutes later," Quinn said.

"I rig cranes at the port, and I'm off work for at least six months."

"I have no savings, and a hospital bill that's already taller than I am."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. You didn't do it." His voice was flat and steady. "Tell me why you really came."

"Because I know what they'll do. They'll pay you to stop asking."

"And if I take it?"

"Then you take it," I said. "I can't pay your bills. I didn't come to tell you what to do."

He studied me for a long moment.

"You sent that voicemail to thirty people," he said. "You know that means you can't take it back."

"I know."

"Your husband know where you are?"

"No."

"He's going to."

I opened my mouth to answer. Down the hall, a rubber-soled squeak stopped outside the door.

A man in a gray suit stepped in with a leather folder under his arm.

It was the family lawyer, the one who had called me emotional that morning.

He saw me and stopped smiling.

"Mrs. Carraway," he said. "How very unexpected."

Behind him, in the corridor, stood Damon. He was not looking at the man in the bed.

He was looking at me.

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