Severed Mother-Daughter Ties novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Garage

Dustin found me at six in the morning, sitting in my car on level three of the parking garage.

I had not started the engine.

He knocked on the window and held up a granola bar, and I unlocked the door.

"You ran a code on a patient you've recused yourself from," he said, climbing into the passenger seat. "The committee is going to love that."

"It was allowed."

"I know it was allowed. I was there. I'm just saying they'll love it."

He tore the granola bar in half and gave me the bigger piece.

"Now tell me what's going on," he said. "You recused yourself from a case you've been studying for a month."

I looked at the concrete wall in front of the car.

I had told no one in twenty years.

Not the teacher who got me out, not the dean who signed my scholarship, not one of the men who had asked me to dinner.

"Colleen Pemberton is my mother," I said.

Dustin stopped chewing.

"She sold me when I was seven," I said. "She got five hundred dollars. I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere by the next morning."

"Kristen."

"The family who bought me had a son in his twenties who couldn't read. He was kind to me, mostly. His parents kept me in a toolshed and put me to work from sunup."

"I broke my leg in a drainage ditch when I was fourteen. A volunteer teacher drove out that winter and saw me limping."

"She took me away in her own car. I took her name when I was fifteen."

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