Reborn, I Gave My Daughter to His Mistress novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Back Row

Gilbert laughed first.

"What are you talking about? Delaney, you told me you grew up in Ohio. You said you were an orphan."

"I said what I needed to say," Delaney told him.

She walked past me into my kitchen, put her purse on the island and turned around to face us.

I stayed standing.

"Your father had a lake house on Larkin Lake," she said. "My mother cleaned it for twenty years."

"I never knew he owned one," I said.

"He made sure of that."

I said nothing.

"He took my mother there," Delaney said. "She was thirty-one. She was the housekeeper, and your mother was in the hospital again that year."

The room stayed quiet.

"I was born the next spring. He paid her in envelopes, every first of the month, cash, for the rest of his life. She cleaned his floors and he did not say my name."

"Delaney," Gilbert began.

"Don't." She never looked at him. "When I was nine, she asked him to say it once. Just once, in front of her. He said, 'Don't confuse the girl.'"

I gripped the back of a stool.

"I grew up in the cottage behind that house," she said. "I watched his car come up the drive every Friday. At sixteen, I carried his bags in, in a gray uniform, and he called me 'miss.'"

I put my hand over my mouth.

"He died on March 9th, nine years ago," she said. "I went to the funeral in a black dress I bought that morning. They put me in the back row. Nobody asked who I was."

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