He Married My Best Friend While I Gave Birth, So I Left novel · Chapter 38 of 48

Chapter 38: The Parking Lot

Byron's POV

I told Lacey I would be back in ten minutes, and she looked at my hands.

"Take as long as you need," she said. "I have him."

Cal didn't look up when I went.

He sat with Poppy's fingers in his fist, staring at the scratched initials in the table, and my mother watched me leave with her head tilted and a pleasant look on her face.

A guard buzzed me out through three doors.

I collected my keys and my phone from the locker and walked across the lot in the thin sun.

The silver sedan sat at the end of the second row, where it had sat when we pulled in.

I opened the passenger door and got in.

Brady didn't turn his head.

He had both hands on the wheel at ten and two, and his ball cap was low on his forehead.

I pulled the door shut, and the lock went down with a click.

"I'm recording this," I said.

I took out my phone and set it on the dashboard, and the red dot came on.

"Good," said Brady.

His voice cracked on it.

"She told him," he said. "Didn't she? She told him about the paper."

"She told him in front of Lacey and a guard, with Poppy on the table. She said she held your hand."

"She did."

"Say it again for the phone."

He took off the cap and set it on the dash next to my phone.

He looked bad, thinner than he had been in the cider line, with his sandy hair over his collar and a gray under his eyes that wasn't from sleep.

"The week after Tara went to Mother's kitchen, I sat at her desk," he said. "I was seventeen. She'd typed the paper. She put the pen in my hand and put hers over it, and I wrote your name at the bottom."

"Why?"

"She said you'd run the family into the ground. She said a girl like Tara would take a boy like you for every acre." He swallowed. "I signed it, and she took the paper out of my hand before the ink dried. She didn't thank me. I've wished every day she'd said anything at all."

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