The Bride He Replaced novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Nobody Watching

I did not let Miles in.

I stood in Bea's doorway with the dish towel still around my thumb, and I told him what he was going to do.

"Tomorrow at ten," I said. "The clinic where we heard his heartbeat. You can bring whoever you want to watch."

"Han."

"Bring your lawyer. Bring your mother. Bring the people you pay."

He looked at Duncan over my shoulder, and I saw him decide to say nothing about it.

"Fine," he said. "Ten."

When I shut the door, my legs went, and Bea put me in a chair.

"You didn't ask Camilla a single question," Duncan said.

"Camilla isn't the one who walked up my steps this morning."

At ten the next day the clinic waiting room held more people than it had held in all the weeks I had been coming.

Miles sat on one side of it with a lawyer in a grey suit and the hotel's head of security.

His secretary sat beside them, a thin woman with a lanyard, and she would not look at me.

Marguerite was in the corner chair with her handbag on her lap.

On my side were Bea and the librarian who ran story hour.

She had asked for the morning off, and I had told her she did not have to come.

"I teach nine-year-olds," she had said. "I can handle this."

Duncan was outside.

That was my rule, not his.

The nurse called my name, and I stood and said, loud enough for the whole room:

"I'll give blood here, and I won't leave until it's drawn."

I turned to face the room.

"I'd like everybody to watch the needle, so nobody can say later that anything was switched."

Nobody in the room moved.

A man behind the desk laid a clean towel on a tray and said, "It'll take a minute, ma'am."

I rolled up my sleeve.

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