Chapter 13: The Wound

I got out of the car before Simon could stop me.

"Clara," he said behind me.

"Stay inside. Please."

I walked across the gravel until I stood a yard from Kyle's phone.

He kept filming.

"Babe," he said, in the soft voice. "Mom told me you took something from her house. I drove over to help you give it back."

"And you found this instead."

"I found this." He tilted the screen to show me the two of us, tangled across the seat. "It's going to look awful at St. Luke's."

I took one of the certified copies out of my bag and held it up.

"Read the spouse line, Kyle."

He did not look at it.

"It's paperwork," he said. "Mom says it's paperwork."

"Brooke Elaine Haney. March fourteenth. She is four months pregnant, and your mother announced it over gravy while Brooke sat in my chair."

"Two o'clock," Kyle said, still smiling. "You sign, and this stays on my phone, and Brooke stays my cousin."

"I'm not signing anything."

"Then Conrad Hallett gets a very interesting video."

"He'll get it from me first," I said. "I'm going to the hospital now."

Something moved behind his face, and for once he had no folder to open.

"You've known him four days," he said.

"That's four days more than your mother let me."

He lowered the phone an inch.

"Don't talk about her like that," he said. "She did what she had to do."

It was the first true thing he had said to me in four years.

Then he heard himself, and he got into his truck, and he backed out of the lot fast enough to throw gravel at the car.

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Cousin Was His Real Wife, So I Took My Father's Name Back from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.