Her 20-Year Silence Ended When Her Daughter Came Back for Revenge novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Stitches

Nesta's POV

They let me out at ten the next morning, and the first thing I saw was Gareth Wincott on the courthouse steps in a wrinkled suit.

Behind him stood a row of cameras.

A neighbor's boat had brought two officers to the lake before dawn, they had taken the driver away in cuffs, and by breakfast the whole station knew who had sent him.

The captain on duty had found a magistrate by nine.

"I am putting up the bail for Nesta Garraty myself," Gareth told the cameras. "I have known her a week. I would put up everything I own."

"Mr. Wincott, is it true she stole from your fiancée?"

"I'll answer every question on Saturday," he said. "In public. At the party."

He took my elbow and walked me through the microphones without looking at one of them.

In the car I said, "Is he alive?"

"He's alive. He's cut across the ribs, forty stitches between the two wounds, and he will not stay in bed." Gareth drove with both hands tight. "Your mother bandaged him herself."

The lake house had a new board nailed over the kitchen door.

Rhys was not in bed.

He was on the porch in a chair with his shirt open and a bandage wound around his chest and his left forearm in a sling, and when he saw me come up the steps, he tried to stand.

"Don't," I said.

He sat back down.

My mother came out behind him with a basin and a cloth, put them in my hands, and went back in.

She had never been subtle.

Gareth looked at the lake and decided to inspect the woodpile.

I knelt on the boards and unwound the outer dressing.

The cuts were closed with black thread, long and angry, one across his forearm and a worse one under the ribs.

"The doctor said no stairs," Rhys said. "He did not say no porches."

"Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"You're talking."

I washed the edge of the wound, and his stomach tightened under my hand.

"You came for my mother," I said.

"I came because she screamed."

"You came at a man with a knife in your own kitchen, with a pan."

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