Severed Mother-Daughter Ties novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: What Chester Kept

Wylie's POV

My father was waiting in his study with the lamp off and the curtains open on the grey yard.

He sat behind the desk in yesterday's shirt, with his cane across his knees.

"You're wearing your shirt wrong," he said.

I looked down.

The buttons were off by one.

"Sit," he said.

I sat.

The house was silent above us.

Colleen slept at the top of the stairs, behind a door I had walked past a thousand times without once wondering what she dreamed about.

"I suspended that woman's privileges on Saturday," my father said. "Do you know why?"

"Colleen asked you to."

"Colleen wept at the kitchen table for an hour and said Dr. Shirley was the forty-second." He rubbed his jaw. "I signed the paper because it was easier than hearing her cry."

"And on Tuesday you lifted it."

"Because my daughter stood up in a hospital gown and told me what I should have told myself."

He turned his face to the window.

He was sixty-eight years old, and for the first time I could see the weight he'd been carrying across his back for most of my life.

"I'm going to tell you a thing I've never said aloud," he said.

I kept very still.

"Her story never added up."

"Dad."

"Let me finish. When we met, she told me her little girl was taken from a mall. I asked what mall. She said she couldn't bear to say."

"That's grief."

"I thought so, too." He opened the bottom drawer of the desk, and took out a thick brown folder with a rubber band around it. "I paid a man in her old state, quietly, the year we married. I wanted to give her something. A police file she could hold."

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