He Married My Best Friend While I Gave Birth, So I Left novel · Chapter 37 of 48

Chapter 37: Seventeen

Cal didn't say anything for a moment.

Poppy squirmed on my lap and reached for the sugar packets in the middle of the table, and I caught her hand without looking down.

"My uncle," said Cal.

"Your Ray," said Eleanor, in the same warm voice. "Though I never liked the name. I had my father's name put on that boy so he'd carry it well."

"Brady wrote it?"

"He wrote Byron's name at the bottom of a paper I had typed myself. He was seventeen. It was the week after Tara came to my kitchen, and he sat at my desk with a good pen."

She said it the way she used to read out a dinner menu.

"I held his hand to steady it," she said. "He shook, poor lamb. We did it three times before the y came out right."

Byron stood up.

He did it slowly, and both his hands were open at his sides.

A guard by the vending machine turned her head and watched him.

"Sit down, Mr. Angell," Eleanor said. "Your boy is watching you."

"You made my brother forge my name."

"I asked a favor of a son, and he did it. It's what sons are for." She turned her eyes back on Cal. "And before you ask, darling, it can't hurt him. The statute ran out when you were small. Nobody can charge Brady with a thing, and nobody can charge me."

"Why are you telling me?" Cal asked.

His voice had gone thin.

"Because you ought to know what this family is," said Eleanor. "Your father is honest, and honest people are lovely, and they fail the people they love. Your uncle is not honest. But he came when I asked him, every time. And so did you."

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