She Bought My Husband for Seven Days, So I Took Back Everything novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Pearls Off

I unlocked the door, and Marilyn came in with the shoebox held in both hands.

She did not look at the shelves or at the velvet.

She looked at me.

"Is there somewhere I can sit down?" she asked. "I haven't slept."

I led her to the cutting table.

Wanda came out of the back room, saw who it was, and stopped with a pair of shears in her hand.

"It's all right, Wanda."

"I'll be in the corner," Wanda said. "With these."

Marilyn untied the string with careful fingers.

Inside lay a stack of canceled checks, clipped in bundles, in her tidy church-secretary handwriting.

"Brent put a drive in my hand on Sunday night," she said. "He told me to watch all of it. I told him I'd seen enough."

"You had."

"I watched until four o'clock this morning." Her voice was dry and steady. "Two hundred and eleven of them. I stopped counting when I got to the one where you said thank you with your face against the pillow."

I said nothing.

"I have done an ugly thing in this family for ten years," Marilyn said. "I'd like to tell you what it was, and then you can throw me out."

"Go ahead."

"When you didn't give us a grandchild, I told Brent it was a woman's job and you were failing at it. I said it over Sunday dinner more than once. I said it in front of Lacey." She pressed her lips together. "She nodded every time."

"I remember."

"I told myself I was being honest. I was being cruel, and I was proud of it."

She pushed the shoebox toward me.

"These are for the clinic. Lacey told me your insurance wouldn't cover the second cycle and that you were too proud to ask us for help. I gave her a check on the first of every month, for fourteen months. Eight hundred dollars. It was supposed to go to the pharmacy."

She laid her hand flat on the stack.

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