My Groom Tried to Steal My Family Empire Through Marriage novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Father's Chair

Brynn's POV

I let her have the ten minutes.

Brice stayed at the gate with his back against the iron bars and his eyes on the road, and I went up the hill again behind my mother.

She walked slowly, in flat shoes, with no driver and no purse.

At the grave she stopped and stood with her hands folded in front of her, the way she had stood at the funeral.

"Fourteen months," she said, "and I haven't been here since the day."

"Why not?"

"Because he'd have had something to say." She almost smiled. "He wrote you a letter, you know. I read it in my head all week, trying to guess what was in it."

"You can read it."

"No."

She said it so quickly that I knew she meant it.

"I don't want his last word on me to be a page," my mother said. "I'd rather make up the kind one."

She crouched, which was hard for her, and set her palm flat on the stone.

"You could have written me one line, Walter," she told it, quite calmly. "I'd have taken one line."

Then she stood up and brushed the knees of her skirt.

"What happens to me?"

"You keep the house for a year." I had decided it in the truck, and I said it like a business term. "You get an allowance, and the lawyer has the figure. You don't come to the tower. You don't call the board. If you do, the forty hours go to the district attorney."

"A year, and then?"

"And then we'll see."

Her eyes were bright.

"May I come to your wedding?"

"Not this one."

I watched that land.

I didn't take it back, and I didn't make it sound kinder.

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