He Saved Her Child, Abandoned Ours novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Midnight on the Porch

He came at midnight, in the rain.

I was at the kitchen table with the laptop open and my phone face down beside it.

The video had forty thousand shares by then.

Under it, strangers had written things about me that I will not repeat.

A woman who claimed to be a family lawyer said I should be ashamed.

A man said I was obviously after the money.

Bridie had gone to bed at ten with her door open and a poker beside the pillow.

I heard the gate squeal.

I opened the front door before he could knock.

Rafe stood on the step without a coat.

Rain ran down his face and off his chin, and he did not wipe it.

"I saw the clip," he said. "I'm so sorry. It's going to be taken down. I rang my solicitors."

"I'm not interested in the clip."

"I know."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I'm going to tell you," he said. "The thing I couldn't say in the lobby. I'm going to say it all tonight, and then you can do whatever you like."

I should have shut the door.

I stepped out onto the porch and pulled it to behind me, so the child asleep upstairs would hear nothing.

"Talk," I said.

He did not sit.

He stood with his back against the porch post, and it was a long time before he started.

"You remember the winter we'd been married a year," he said. "When we had the row about the house, and you went to your gran's for a fortnight."

"I remember."

"I went to a dinner. Cressida was there. I'd known her at university, we were together for a while before you." He stopped. "I was angry, and lonely, and she was kind to me."

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