Marked by My Ex's Biggest Rival novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Last Client

Roark's hand closed on my wrist before I could go back up that drive.

"Don't," he said. "There's a hundred witnesses on that lawn, and now they all saw her steal. Let them keep that picture."

Desiree waved at us from the gate and walked back to her party.

I sat in the truck with Gran's book in my lap and the two torn stubs under my thumb.

"I can draw it from memory," I said. "The crescent. The flower."

"You drew it on your arm last night, and it burned."

"So something's missing, and the page that might have said what was just burned in a fireplace."

Roark started the truck and didn't drive.

"The ledger," he said after a while.

"What?"

"In the archive. After 1931 there were no moons. But there was one." He was frowning at the windshield. "1965. Somebody drew a little moon in pencil next to a name. I thought it was a kid scribbling."

I turned to look at him.

"Is she still alive?"

"She's eighty-four," he said. "She lives at the care home by the bridge. She's my grandfather's cousin. She calls me by my father's name."

The care home smelled like lemon cleaner and pot roast.

The old woman sat by a window in a pink cardigan with a crossword in her lap and a blanket over her knees.

She looked up when Roark knelt beside her chair.

Her whole face lit up.

"There's my boy," she said, and patted his cheek, and called him by his dead father's name.

He just held her hand.

"I brought somebody to meet you," he said.

She looked at me.

Then she looked at my apron, and the black ink under my nails, and the sapphire at my throat.

Her eyes went sharp.

"That's her necklace," she said. "That's her sapphire."

"It was my grandmother's," I said.

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