Chapter 16: Rhett's POV: The Forty Names

Rhett's POV

The night before the wedding I sat at my kitchen table with a list I knew by heart.

Forty names, written in my own hand in the front of a ledger, one to a line.

I had read them aloud on the first night of every month since I took the chair.

Tonight I could not get past the sixth.

Cedar Ridge had moved the Rawson family into the east wing of my house the day Hiram's men came up the drive.

Her parents had the guest room at the end of the hall, and a guard on the stairs.

Jessa had the room across from mine, and neither of us had mentioned that.

"You've been on the sixth for ten minutes," she said from the doorway.

She was in my flannel shirt and nothing else I could see.

"You were asleep."

"I woke up. You weren't there."

I closed the ledger.

She crossed the kitchen and opened it again, and turned it so the lines faced her.

"Tell me about the sixth."

"He drove the feed truck."

"The feed truck?"

"He had a wife who made terrible pies, and he ate every one."

"What happened to him?"

"He took a bullet on the river road, where he'd gone to look for a lost dog."

She put her finger under the line.

"Tell me about the seventh."

I told her about the seventh.

I told her about the eighth, and the ninth, and she listened to every one without offering me one word of comfort.

It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in three years.

When I stopped, she was holding my hand on the table.

"Tomorrow they stand with you," she said.

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