She Took My Husband on My Wedding Night, I Didn't Find Out Until We Gave Birth Together novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Christmas

Cormac sat up straighter in the bed, gauze and all.

I didn't get off it.

"Get rid of her," I said. "Like a stain?"

"Like a problem." Bradford looked at the lilies in his hand as if somebody else had bought them. "She's started asking me things."

"What things?"

"How long the east wing went without a working smoke detector. Whether the insurance on the house is in my name or Gran's." He swallowed. "Last week I told her I wanted her and the boy in an apartment of their own after New Year's."

"And?"

"She smiled. She said if I ever leave, the video goes to Gran's lawyers. Then she said old houses burn down all the time."

The monitors beeped.

Nobody in the room said anything for a while.

"You're scared of her," I said.

"I'm scared for him." His voice dropped. "He's mine too, Clementine."

It was the first time I'd heard him say it meant something.

"So go to the police."

"With what? A smile?" He stepped closer to the bed. "The video's in her cloud. I pay for her phone. I can get it."

"Then get it."

"I will. You take it to the DA. You show them her hand, the pills, the bracelet. That's all anyone needs." He held my eyes. "And you never say what I did after."

Cormac's good hand closed on the blanket.

"What you did," I said.

"What I let happen."

"You told me yourself, at breakfast, like a menu."

"I'm asking you to leave that part out."

"So you keep the chair."

He didn't answer.

That was an answer.

"No," I said. "I don't trade one of you for the other. Sign the statement I asked you for in August. Then we'll talk about her."

"You'd let her walk around free to protect a principle."

"I'm not protecting a principle. I'm refusing to protect you."

A nurse came in behind him with a cart.

She looked at the lilies.

"No flowers on this floor," she said. "Infection risk. I'll take those."

She took them out of his hand before he could decide whether to let her.

Bradford stood there with nothing in his hands.

Then he turned and left.

Cormac let his head fall back on the pillow.

"He brought lilies," he said. "To a burn unit."

"He's never visited anybody in a hospital before."

"He visited you."

"He came to tell me he drugged me. That doesn't count as visiting."

The graft took the first week of December.

They sent him home with a tan pressure sleeve from his fingers to his elbow and orders to keep it on twenty-three hours a day.

He learned to change Margo one-handed in four days.

He learned to swear quietly in two.

The bakery did the Christmas rush with a line down Bunker Hill Street every morning.

I baked until my wrists ached.

The crew took shifts at the register in their blue sweatshirts.

Margo sat in a high chair behind the counter, throwing crackers at customers.

She was eight and a half months old.

She'd learned to say "ba," which the big guy decided meant bakery.

On Christmas Eve we closed at three.

The crew came in from the firehouse with the lieutenant's four nieces and a ham nobody had cooked.

I cooked it.

The probie hung white lights across the front window, crooked, and refused to fix them because crooked was festive.

Winifred's driver brought a box of mint chocolates with a card in her slow new hand.

"Merry Christmas. Do not let the probie near the ham."

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