The Diary of an Unloved Wife novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Final

Moira's room was on the sixth floor, two doors down from the one I'd had in December.

It had the same window and the same view of the courtyard garden.

The snow in it had gone grey.

She looked very small in the bed.

Her glasses were folded on the tray table, still on their chain.

There was a line in the back of her hand and a monitor clipped to her finger.

The doctor had told me in the corridor that it was her heart, and that she'd been lucky her sister was home.

Colleen sat on one side of the bed in her cream coat.

Keira sat on the other, scrolling her phone with her knees pulled up.

They both looked up when I came in.

Keira's face went red, then white.

She hadn't posted anything since last night.

"What is she doing here?" Colleen said.

"I asked for her," said Moira.

Her voice was a thread, but it stopped them both.

"Come here, pet."

I went to the foot of the bed.

I didn't sit.

Moira looked at me for a long time with her pale tired eyes.

"Mom, you need to rest," Colleen said. "She can come back."

"I've rested twenty years." Moira didn't look at her. "Margery. There's something your father made me promise never to tell you."

Colleen's hand stopped on the blanket.

"The summer you were nineteen, he saw you on the beach at Wellfleet with Winslow. He saw how you looked at that boy."

My throat closed.

"He came home and sat in my kitchen and said, 'Moira, she's going to marry the wrong brother, and he'll break her heart for sport.'" Moira's mouth trembled. "That's why he put the elder one first in his letter. Not because he liked him better. Because he was trying to keep you away from Winslow."

I held the rail at the foot of the bed.

My father had sat in our kitchen and worried about me, and I'd never known.

For five years I'd thought he'd simply chosen someone else for me.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because he made me swear. And then the wedding came, and it was too late, and what would it have done but hurt you?"

"And Keira?"

Moira closed her eyes.

"I knew it would hurt you more," she whispered. "I was a coward. I'm not asking you to forgive it. I wanted you to have the one true thing I had left."

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