This Is Where We Stop novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Chantal

The article ran four thousand words and had my name in the headline.

In it, Chantal Ransom said she was a grieving woman who had been used.

She said she had lost her oldest friend to a surgeon who flew off to a mountain, found a handsome colleague, and came home to destroy a good man.

She said Mara Kincaid had used a dead man's grieving brother to bring down a good man, and she called that cruelty.

At the bottom, she announced that she would take questions at noon in front of her office.

"She's making herself the one in mourning," Padraig said.

"She's making herself the victim."

"Same thing, to her."

We stood in the doorway of the rental with the news open on his phone.

"You don't have to go," he said.

"I know."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes."

He smiled a little, without any humor.

"Then I'm driving."

Her office was a storefront on Hawthorne with a bay window full of house photographs.

The sidewalk was crowded.

There were two camera crews and a reporter from the paper, and a dozen people with phones.

Chantal stood in the middle on a small box so they could see her.

She wore black, and a pearl necklace, and she had dressed her face to look like she had cried without ruining it.

"I never meant for anyone to be hurt," she was saying. "I was a frightened woman on the side of the road, and I called the only person who had ever picked up. I didn't know there was another call. Nobody told me."

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