Sweetheart Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wake
Willa walks into her father's wake seven years after being exiled, finds her fiance with her stepsister, and hears her stepmother demand $300,000 by Friday.
I came home to Charleston seven years after my stepmother sent me away, and the first person on the porch called me a thief.
She did not say it to my face.
She said it behind her hand to the woman beside her, and she said it loud enough for me to hear.
I kept walking.
The door of my father's house on Tradd Street stood open.
Black coats filled the front hall, and the whole place smelled of lilies and coffee.
My father had died on Monday of a heart attack, at sixty-three.
A lawyer's email had told me so on Tuesday, in the same tone as an invoice.
It was Wednesday evening, and I was twenty-six years old, and I had never been so tired.
A framed photograph of Dad stood on an easel by the stairs.
He was laughing in it, and I did not remember the last time I had seen him do that.
I touched the corner of the frame.
"Sorry, Daddy," I said quietly.
Then I heard a woman laugh in the library, low and breathless, and I knew that laugh.
It was Lacey, my stepsister.
The library doors were pulled almost shut.
A man's voice said, "Not here, Lace, your mother's twenty feet away."
"That's why," Lacey said.
I knew that voice too.
It belonged to the man who had put a ring on my finger when I was nineteen.
Dale Cantwell had written me letters for a year in Anchorage, and then he had stopped.
I had told myself he was busy.
I looked down at my left hand.
I was still wearing his ring.
I had worn it through four winters of fish plant shifts and three more in a bakery.
Nobody had ever told me it was over.
I pushed both library doors wide open.
Lacey sat on the edge of my father's desk with her black dress hiked up around her hips.
Dale stood between her knees with his belt undone and his face in her neck.
He had my father's gold watch on his wrist.
For one second nobody moved.
Then the people in the hall behind me went quiet, one coat at a time.
Dale turned, and his smile arrived late.
"Willa," he said.
"Hello, Dale."
My voice came out perfectly steady, and I was proud of it.
Lacey slid off the desk and tugged her hem down with both hands.
She wore my mother's pearls, three strands of them, and they had slipped over one shoulder.
I looked at the pearls for a long moment.
"Those were in my mother's jewelry box," I said.
"Willa, let me explain," Dale said.
"You can explain it to them."
I turned and stepped aside, so the whole hall could see.
Maybe forty people stood there with plates and cups.
Nobody looked away.
I pulled the engagement ring off my finger, and it came off easily, because it had always been a little loose.
I walked to the silver bowl of sympathy cards on the hall table.
I dropped the ring in with the cards.
It made a very small sound.
"Thank you all for coming," I said.
"My father would have hated this, so I'll be quick. Dale, keep the watch. It's the only thing in this house you didn't steal."
Somebody coughed.
Somebody else whispered my name.
"Move," said a voice behind the crowd, and the crowd moved.
Delilah came through it in a black dress with her silver-blond hair pinned up.
My stepmother was fifty-four now, and she had not aged a day.
She looked at me.
"Security," she said, without raising her voice.
"Mrs. Habersham," a man said uncertainly, and nobody came forward.
"She is not welcome in this house," Delilah said to the room.
"Seven years ago she stole three hundred thousand dollars from her own father's safe."
"My husband was too kind to prosecute."
"He is dead now, and I am not kind."
Her eyes came back to me, bright and cold.
"You will repay every cent by Friday at five o'clock, or the sheriff finishes what he started."
The silence in the hall felt like water closing over my head.
I had three hundred and twelve dollars in my bank account.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend