You Lost Us In The Test novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Episode 41

I watched the whole episode sitting on a box marked BOOKS.

It was twenty-two minutes long.

Kenzie had done a good job. She always did.

The dinner opened on a slow shot of the Elstows' table with soft piano under it. Candles. Linen. Preston's mother laughing.

There wasn't one close-up of the food.

You couldn't see the chili oil. You couldn't see the soup.

You saw me pushing a plate away, and Preston's mother's face falling.

"She didn't even try my cooking," his mother said to the camera in an interview I'd never known about. Her eyes were wet. "I was up since five."

Then me, standing, saying there was a problem at the lab.

Kenzie's voice-over, gentle. "There was no problem at the lab."

Then the clerk's office, shot from low across the hall, with hours of waiting cut down to one glance at my phone.

"Waiting for a man she knew wasn't coming," Kenzie said. "Or waiting for the cameras?"

Then my doorstep. My ring dropping into the roses.

My voice, cut clean. "The baby is mine. You're not in this."

Kenzie, straight to camera, sad.

"Here's the thing nobody wants to say. She's never been to a single appointment with him. She never once touched her stomach on our footage."

Freeze-frame on my flat front in the blue dress.

"Ask yourself why a woman would keep a man away from her own pregnancy."

Then the yellow letters again. Then the pink heart lock.

The comments were already at forty thousand.

"Fake bump fake tears fake everything."

"She trapped him and got caught. Love that for her."

"The mom made dinner for HOURS and this girl walked out. Raised by wolves."

"Find out where she works lol."

Somebody had.

Hartwell's Facebook page had three hundred new comments under a post about strawberries.

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