He Played Husband for Her Dare, So I Left Carrying His Baby novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Delia

I found Delia behind the stage, between a stack of folding chairs and the generator truck.

She was alone, and she was shaking.

The pearl woman's speech was still going on the other side of the canvas, steady and cold, and every few sentences the crowd answered it.

"Libby." Delia turned when she heard my step. "Libby, I never meant..."

"Don't."

"You have to understand."

"I don't have to do anything."

She put her hands on her head and pressed down.

Then her face came apart, and what was behind it was not what I had braced for.

It was not shame.

It was fury.

"Fifteen years!" she said. "Do you know what I gave him? Fifteen years! I was eighteen. I was the one who stayed up all night with him when his father died. I was at every dinner and every hospital waiting room, and I was the one he called."

"You were his friend."

"I was his everything, and he married you."

I said nothing.

"He married a girl with a nice laugh, and I stood there in a blue dress at the wedding and I clapped." Her voice cracked and rose. "I planned your wedding. I picked your flowers!"

"I know. I carried them down the aisle."

"And when he came to me and said it was him, he was crying. He said, Dee, I can't tell her. And I thought, finally. Finally he's telling me and not her."

I kept my hands still.

"So I told him to let you think it," she said. "I told him it was better. I held his hand all night while he made up his mind. And for four years it was our secret. Mine and his."

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