He Was There for Her Baby, Not Mine novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: After Hours

Dalton's mother locked the diner at nine and turned off everything but the light over the corner booth.

The chairs sat upside down on the tables, and the coffee smell had gone cold.

She had asked Colette to come "to make peace," and Colette had said yes before she finished the sentence.

Colette arrived at ten past, in the long white coat, with Arlen in a carrier and a pie in a foil tin.

"I don't want anyone fighting," she said, setting the tin on the booth table. "I just want Arlen to have a family."

My father sat beside Dalton's mother with Trudy asleep in his arm.

Dalton sat across from me. I had put him there on purpose.

I laid Jack's letter on the table, the yellow sheet in pencil, and then Colette's printer paper beside it.

"I'd like to ask one thing first," I said.

"Of course."

"Where were you the night before Jack died?"

Her face was perfectly kind.

"Wisconsin. I told you. I was on bed rest, and I'd have given anything to get there."

"Today on my father's porch you said you held his hand while he wrote your page."

"I didn't say that."

"You did," my father said. "I was holding your son. I heard it."

Colette looked at my father.

I watched her decide, and I watched it take a long time.

"I came on the last night," she said. "I drove through. I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to know that I had made it when you hadn't. That wasn't fair to you."

"Thank you," I said.

I meant it. Now she had told me two stories, and only one of them could be true.

"Jack's right hand was crushed in the fall," I said. "He wrote his letter with his left, in pencil, because a pencil was all the nurse would give him."

"Look at yours."

I turned the printer paper to face Dalton's mother.

"Four straight lines. Blue ballpoint, in a right hand. Signed Jack Doyle with a loop on the J."

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