My Fiancé Let Her Ruin Our Wedding but Insisted It Was Just a Joke novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Rehab Wing

I had never told Jenna to hold my money.

I had never told anyone anything about that account except Conor, and he had asked me nothing.

I said so to Jenna on the dance floor, and she believed me.

She showed me nothing yet, because Conor was walking toward us, so I let her go and left with my aunt.

My aunt drove me to the rehab wing, because my car was still boxed in by the catering van.

Jenna's words rode in the back seat the whole way.

*He told me you wanted me to hold it for you.*

I was still wearing the dress and Tobias Hallett's jacket.

The night nurse at the front desk looked at me and the jacket and did not say a word.

My mother was awake in room 214, sitting up in bed with the television on mute and her reading glasses pushed into her grey hair.

She had a heart valve that was five weeks new and a scar under her nightgown that I checked every morning.

She looked at the dress.

She looked at my face.

"Come here," she said.

I sat on the edge of the bed and put my head against her shoulder, and for the first time all day I cried.

She let me.

She stroked my hair with her good hand and did not ask me anything.

After a while she said, "The neighbour from next door called me at five o'clock."

"Of course she did."

"She watches videos on her phone all day. She said, 'Is that your Darcy?'"

I lifted my head.

"You saw it?"

"I saw enough."

My mother's mouth set in a line I had not seen since my father died.

"You proposed to that boy four times," she said.

"Mom."

"I was keeping score too, God help me."

She took off her glasses.

"Do you know why you did it? Because you saw me sitting alone at the kitchen table for two years after your father, and you swore you would never be the woman waiting at the table. So you grabbed the first boy who said yes, and you held on."

My eyes stung again.

"That is on me," she said. "Not you."

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