The Wife He Never Knew I Became novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: The Boat

Mei already had the laptop out from under the counter.

Her fingers were shaking so hard she typed the password wrong twice.

"Save it," I said. "Three places. Don't play it."

"Don't play it? Lena. I want to play it at your wedding. I want to play it at my funeral."

"Don't play it."

She saved it to the laptop, to a little silver stick on her keyring, and to a folder she named VANESSA IS GOING TO JAIL.

"Rename that."

"No."

Then she turned to me with her glasses still fogged from the cooler.

"Can I post it? Just once? Just for an hour?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because she didn't say it to the internet," I said. "She said it to me. And she said the first version to the family."

Mei looked at me for a long time.

"You've got a place in mind," she said.

"I've got a date."

At breakfast Holden had his phone to his ear before the coffee was poured.

"Put the columnist's lawyer on the line at nine," he was saying. "And the website's."

I took the phone out of his hand and ended the call.

He looked at me over the toast.

"I was busy," he said.

"You were being my husband in a courtroom. I want you being my husband in a restaurant."

"Where?"

I took a red envelope off the fridge, from under a magnet shaped like a salmon.

It had come the week after the gala, addressed in my aunt's careful bookkeeper's hand.

MR. AND MRS. HOLDEN VALE.

Inside was a gold card. Her sixtieth birthday banquet. Saturday the sixth of June, a seafood restaurant in Richmond. Twenty tables.

"She invited Mrs. Rutherford," Holden said, reading it.

"She invited the money."

"And you're going."

"Every person who ever repeated it will be in one room," I said. "Eating lobster."

He put the card down slowly.

"Remind me never to cross you," he said.

On Tuesday night I was sitting on the hatch of his father's boat on the Fraser.

His father's boat was a thirty-six-foot wooden gillnetter, white with a green wheelhouse, older than both of us.

A bank had taken it off his father when Holden was twelve.

Six years ago he'd found it outside Prince Rupert, full of crab traps and rainwater.

He paid the man cash before he could change his mind.

He'd spent three summers putting it back together with his own scarred hands.

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