I Dumped My Groom and Married My Childhood Crush in 30 Minutes novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: What He Took

He told me at the kitchen counter, with the kettle starting to rattle on the woodstove behind him.

"My mother's heart gave out the winter I was twenty-two," Conway said.

"I remember."

"The surgery was in Boston. It was eighty thousand dollars, and the insurance covered none of it."

I remembered that too.

I had been nineteen, home from my first year of nursing school, and I had brought her soup.

"I went to the one person in this town who had that kind of money," he said. "I went to Eleanor Harcourt."

"You asked her for a loan."

"I asked for a job. Any job. I'd have mowed her lawn for thirty years."

"And she said no."

"She said yes." His voice was flat. "She wrote the check on the spot. Then she told me the condition."

I waited.

"I had to leave Marlow Point before the end of the week. I couldn't come back. And I could never write to you or call you."

The kettle began to whistle.

Neither of us moved.

"Why would she ask for that?" I said. "I was nobody. I was a housekeeper's daughter."

"I asked her that too."

"What did she say?"

"She said it was kinder to everyone." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I took it. My mother was in a hospital bed with a gray face, Annalise. I took it, and I left."

"You didn't say goodbye."

"No."

"I stood at the fence for two weeks."

He looked at me, and I saw his throat move.

"I know."

"I wrote you three letters. I wrote them over eleven months, and I mailed them to your mother's house, the only address I had. You never wrote back."

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